TI chip for 3G/4G costs less than FPGA

Texas Instruments has introduced transmit/receive processors with digital pre-distortion (DPD) for 3G and 4G wireless base stations, remote radio heads and government communication systems. The GC533x family features two turn-key processors that provide a complete and flexible digital transmit and receive solution for wide-bandwidth and multi-antenna wireless base stations.

TI says these devices are the industry's widest bandwidth, and costs fraction of high-gate-count FPGAs and also without the time and investment required to develop a custom ASIC solution.

The key features include:

1. The GC533x family provides up to 148 MHz of fifth order corrected transmit bandwidth with crest factor reduction (CFR), along with wideband digital up/down converters with fractional re-samplers, 48-bit numerically controlled oscillators (NCO) and automatic gain control that can support four transmit and eight receive antennas simultaneously.
2. When combined with the low-cost, high-performance TMS320C6748 floating point DSP, the GC533x platform offers customers a high-performance adaptive DPD algorithm or the ability to implement their own DPD IP.
3. Enable power amplifier efficiencies of 40 percent in three carrier LTE operation with 54-dB adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) and 48-dBm output.
4. Delivers 20 dB of ACLR improvement compared to uncorrected signals in wide-bandwidth applications and 40 dB improvement in narrow-bandwidth applications while offering multi-channel, multi-carrier, multi-mode and multi-band support for standards such as 3GPP, MC-GSM, WiMAX, WiBRO and 3GPP2.
5. Includes interfaces for up to four transmit and eight receive antennas and a real or complex observation path, enabling 2x2, 2x4, 4x4 and 4x8 transmit/receive solutions while simplifying board layout.
6. Features 48 digital up/down convert channels configurable for data rates of 184 MS/s with four fractional re-samplers, 48-bit NCOs and a bulk up-converter that enables expanded clocking and frequency planning flexibility.
7. Integrates I/Q imbalance correction for enhanced performance of wideband complex receive and DPD observation signal chains, enabling lower sample rate and lower-cost receive and feedback analog-to-digital converters (ADCs).
8. Developers are supported with $ 8500 costing GC5330SEK system evaluation and reference design kit provides a complete transceiver reference design for wide bandwidth applications.

Package: 23-mm x 23-mm TE-PBGA package
Availability: Now
Price: $80 per 1K pieces