CommAgility, Tata Elxsi and AxisNT team up to demonstrate a WiMAX base station reference architecture

At this year’s Mobile World Congress (16-19 February), CommAgility, Tata Elxsi (Booth 2D98, Hall 2) and Axis Network Technology (Booth Hall 1 - Stand 1H29) will demonstrate a WiMAX base-station reference solution including WiMAX baseband processing and WiMAX Remote Radio Heads. The three companies worked together at integrating their reference designs and commercial products into a base station reference design.

The demonstration system shows Tata Elxsi’s WiMAX baseband software running on CommAgility’s AMC-3C87F signal processing board, linked to the AxisNT Remote Radio Head (RRH) over CPRI and then output as an OFDMA modulated RF signal. This RF signal is then displayed on a spectrum analyser to show 4W output power at 64QAM meeting the ETS 302 544 spectral mask and stringent EVM specifications.

CommAgility’s AMC-3C87F includes three Texas Instruments TCI6487 multi-core digital signal processors operating at 1GHz which serve as the primary processing elements. A Xilinx Virtex-5 SX95T FPGA offers additional acceleration. These processors combined with flexible, high bandwidth I/O connectivity provide three sector WiMAX/LTE PHY capability on a single-width Advanced Mezzanine Card (AdvancedMC).

AxisNT’s integrated Remote Radio Heads (RRH) are available for a complete range of WiMAX and LTE applications and include a complete analogue signal chain from Texas Instruments, including dataconverters, RF products, clock synthesis and power management. AxisNT’s patented amplifier technology enables its RRHs to provide market-leading uplink and downlink performance, which improves network coverage and capacity for its customers. The convection-cooled RRHs use substantially less power than traditional basestations, and can reduce the site CAPEX and OPEX of a wireless network by as much as 90%. Axis Radio Remote Head technology is suitable for TDD and FDD mode.

Tata Elxsi provides complete, flexible, software for developing WiMAX 802.16e basestation solutions, including variants such as macro, micro and pico. The software includes Wave 2 compliant MAC and PHY layer software, R6 interface and network management software, and can also be used to develop femtocells to address indoor mobility issues.

“This system is a good example of how TI’s third-party ecosystem speeds development of a complete DSP-based wireless PHY implementation with off the shelf components,” said Dr. Arnon Friedmann, worldwide marketing director for TI’s wireless infrastructure group. “CommAgility, AxisNT and Tata Elxsi have proven the ability to develop interworking digital and analogue components for WiMAX applications using TI’s high performance processors. Tata Elxsi’s software solution allows customers to build and customize a complete WiMAX solution quickly and easily.”

“Demonstrating reference design platforms or products that are part of a base station system is always challenging before the complete integration is done,” said Simon Mellor, CEO and Co-founder of AxisNT. “By working on the interoperability with Tata Elxsi and CommAgility, we are able to demonstrate each other’s expertise and product performances to our OEM customers before we engage with them on specific integration activities.”

“Flexibility in development and design re-use are essential in wireless baseband,” said Prasanna Gokhale, WiMAX and 4G Wireless Solutions marketing at Tata Elxsi. “By combining Tata Elxsi’s software with hardware from CommAgility and AxisNT, we have been able to provide a verified complete solution that can scale to address single sector as well as multi-sector base station solutions, and cuts time to market and increases design confidence.”

“WiMAX will provide true mobile broadband, but make high demands for signal processing performance,” said Edward Young, managing director of CommAgility. “By partnering with companies such as AxisNT and Tata Elxsi, we are able to meet these requirements and enable our boards to be easily integrated into complete MicroTCA based wireless broadband systems.”

“By working together to demonstrate interoperability, AxisNT and CommAgility have shown that we can provide the levels of performance that OEMs are demanding,” said Michel Vieuxmaire, Sales Director of AxisNT. “The commercial success of Next Generation Networks will be crucially dependent on flexible radio systems that can deliver high power and high efficiency to minimise ecological impact and both OPEX and CAPEX. The coming roadmap for radio remote head is very exciting and Axis is pleased to be working in partnership with industry leaders to deliver it to the market.”