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RF Transceivers Advance Design And Deployment of Small 4G Base Stations

19th May 2009

Analog Devices

ES Admin

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Analog Devices is adding to its broad RF portfolio with the announcement today of new integrated RF-to-digital baseband transceivers. The AD9356 and AD9357 integrated transceivers advance low-cost base-station designs and deployments for 4G technology, such as WiMAX and LTE (long term evolution). The deployment of WiMAX continues in both developed and developing nations to provide last-mile connectivity and wireless backhaul channels. As a result, the need for ubiquitous coverage and a high degree of spectral efficiency requires operators and base-station manufacturers to deploy greater numbers of smaller picocells and microcells to increase network capacity.

According to recent industry reports, WiMAX equipment revenue, including fixed and mobile WiMAX base stations, CPE, and other devices, will reach over $59 billion during 2012 with cumulative revenue totaling over $150 billion from 2006 through 2012. The total number of WiMAX base-station shipments, which includes picocells and microcells, is expected to reach nearly $3 million by 2012. Analyst reports also say LTE subscribership could reach 72 million by 2013 and that the total LTE infrastructure market, including enhanced NodeBs and EPC (evolved packet core) equipment, is set to top $5 billion in 2013.

Today's WiMAX and LTE infrastructure equipment generally rely on a multitude of discrete components, often exceeding power budgets while missing time-to-market goals, said Tom Gratzek, product line director, WiMAX Transceiver Group, Analog Devices. Typical picocell base-station transceivers comprise six to eight active components, while microcell base stations can easily require double this component count. Designs that exploit ADI's new AD9356 and AD9357 integrated transceivers can reduce the component count for a 2x2 transceiver to a single device, while cutting power consumption by at least 50 percent.

Furthermore, using a single transceiver across multiple base-station platforms (picocell and microcell) greatly simplifies the hardware design cycle. The new transceivers' configurability allows designers to develop and maintain configurable software to support multiple platforms (i.e. operators, transmit power levels, frequency bands, channel bandwidth). This flexibility, when combined with industry-leading RF performance, can significantly speed time-to-market and translate into more than 50 percent BOM (bill-of-material) savings.