TI's small base station baseband chips can easily cope with the data explosion in the 3G/4G era

The advent of the mobile Internet era has brought about a sharp increase in the amount of mobile communication data. How to deal with the surge in traffic has become a difficult problem faced by operators. This problem cannot be completely solved by simply improving the spectrum efficiency of macro base stations. Small base stations have unique advantages in improving coverage, providing higher network capacity, and reducing energy consumption. They play a great role in helping macro base stations disperse data flow pressure. Miniaturization of base stations may become the most direct and effective means to solve this problem.

　　However, the deployment of small base stations faces many problems: how to power the equipment? How to achieve data backflow? How to layout, how to install and how to conduct market regulation, etc. At the same time, the upgradeability of small base stations must also be considered. For example, when upgrading from 3G to LTE, should the software or hardware be upgraded? In addition, the Chinese market also has the special characteristics of supporting three 3G standards, TD-SCDMA, WCDMA and CDMA2000, and two 4G standards, TD-LTE and FDD LTE. Operators urgently need a unified, flexible and scalable platform to support multiple modes and smooth upgrades from 3G to 4G; and for small base station equipment manufacturers, how to make their equipment meet the requirements of multi-mode support and scalability while having low power consumption and differentiated characteristics is their focus. They hope to have a scalable and high-performance platform to help them achieve differentiated products.

　　Texas Instruments' small base station baseband chips support PoE+ and up to 3mpps transmission performance, which can achieve traffic aggregation and provide 3G, 4G and WiFi integrated transmission. Texas Instruments (TI) recently released the TCI6630K2L, a BOM-optimized low-power small base station baseband chip for developers of indoor enterprise PoE+ and outdoor micro base stations. Brian Glinsman, vice president of TI's processor business unit, said that the TCI6630K2L system-on-chip based on the KeyStone architecture will support the integration of various features and performance standards equivalent to macro services, which can not only provide small cell developers with a unified software and hardware platform to fully meet a variety of different indoor and outdoor use requirements, but also bring differentiated features through programmability to modify the platform according to evolving needs. The company also paired the TCI6630K2L with a latest analog RF chip AFE7500. The combination of the two can fully meet the strict base station power consumption and cost requirements without affecting performance characteristics, achieving a huge breakthrough in solving various challenges in the development of the small cell market.

　　According to reports, TCI6630K2L is a platform that supports PoE+, using a dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 RISC processor and four TI fixed-point and floating-point TMS320C66x digital signal processor (DSP) cores. This solution is highly integrated with the digital radio frequency front end (DRFE), supporting features such as crest factor reduction (CFR) and digital pre-distortion (DPD). In addition, TCI6630K2L also includes a powerful network coprocessor that supports up to 3mpps transmission performance, thereby enabling traffic aggregation and providing 3G, 4G and WiFi integrated transmission. In addition, it also integrates a fully integrated 4-port Gigabit Ethernet switch, eliminating the need for external small cell components, helping to save costs.

　　The solution platform helps OEMs develop a scalable portfolio of high-performance indoor enterprise small cells that support up to 128 users. It combines L1/L2/L3 baseband performance with a fully integrated digital radio front end to fully meet the application requirements of single-band, dual-band, simultaneous dual-mode and carrier aggregation within the PoE+ power budget (less than 25W). "TI's TCI6630K2L is arguably the industry's first base station solution that can do this," Glinsman emphasized. In addition, the device provides the performance headroom needed to meet more advanced requirements, helping operators use a single solution for indoor and outdoor deployments to ensure that their platform meets future needs and can be expanded.

　　
Figure TI's highly integrated small base station solution can meet stringent base station performance, power consumption and cost requirements

　　Connecting the baseband chip TCI6630K2L and the analog front-end transceiver AFE7500 through the highly efficient industry-standard interface JESD204B can not only simplify the interconnection between the two chips and ensure performance, but also eliminate the need for external glue logic between the RF transceiver and the digital baseband, thereby further reducing the board space of small cellular base stations. The complete solution composed of these two devices can effectively improve the efficiency of the power amplifier and reduce the overall power consumption of the indoor solution by up to 8W. The CFR and DPD integrated in the baseband chip can even help achieve 2W of energy savings per antenna at an output power of 125mW, which is particularly important for meeting PoE+ requirements.

　　In addition to the AFE7500, TI also provides clocks and power for Ethernet solutions at both ends of the cable, helping equipment manufacturers systematically solve the challenges of small cells. "TI's long-standing leadership in base station technology, coupled with its analog expertise, can provide a better wireless experience for all users, from customers to network operators to small cell manufacturers," said Glinsman.

　　In terms of software support, TCI6630K2L integrates a complete software development kit keyStone Base Station SoftwarePac (a production-ready small cell PHY software suite), including SoC platform drivers, multi-core software development kits, RF development kits, standard small base station physical interfaces, etc. The development kit provides a complete PHY layer for single- and dual-mode LTE and WCDMA, eliminating one of the most complex tasks in base station design. The supplementary package of TCI6630K2L also includes pre-integrated DRFE software and AFE software development kits, allowing developers to seamlessly plan all digital radio components including DPD. The complete software solution helps manufacturers save the time, resources and budget usually required for PHY development, and provides sufficient programmable space so that they can customize differentiated small cell products according to the needs of different network operators.

　　"China's 3G and 4G market is a very fast-growing market. The complete chip + software solution we provide can help users achieve the highest aggregation products, help speed up the product launch process and provide high flexibility, so that products can easily meet the needs of operators. Our solution can maximize the advantages of TDD, can arbitrarily configure uplink and downlink bandwidths and support single-frequency or dual-frequency modes; a single chip integrates macro base station-level DPD/CFR, can seamlessly link with RF, and can also reduce power consumption and costs; our platform has excellent performance and energy efficiency, supports carrier aggregation, and the overall board-level power consumption is less than 20W, which meets PoE+ requirements." Glinsman concluded.