Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) and NXP (NASDAQ: NXPI) announced their collaboration to reduce CapEx and OpEx costs of wireless infrastructure radios. The two companies have been working together to enable customers to quickly and easily combine Xilinx's newest crest factor reduction (CFR) and digital pre-distortion (DPD) SmartCORE™ IP with NXP's Gen9 LDMOS RF highly efficient power amplifier technology. The combination of NXP's advanced power amplifier devices and Xilinx All Programmable devices and radio IP enables customers to implement smaller, lighter and higher reliability radios suitable for use in next-generation wireless infrastructure equipment.
"Industry collaboration like this is critical in the effort to reduce CapEx and OpEx costs of next generation cellular infrastructure radios," said Christophe Cugge, director of marketing, base station power amplifiers, NXP Semiconductors. "Our joint efforts have resulted in a solution offering higher unit efficiency with lower cost and higher reliability."
Power amplifiers of higher efficiency achieve the same radio output power and enable a CapEx saving through the use of lower power rated devices and reduced cooling mechanics. Xilinx's Zynq®-7000 All Programmable SoC is the first hardware and software programmable device supporting the latest generation of CPRI at 10.1Gbps and JESD204B at 12.5 Gbps line rates. The Zynq device also enables integration of advanced signal processing algorithms such as CFR and DPD with ARM® processor-based control plane software for remote radios, distributed antenna systems, and repeater products. In addition, smaller heat sinks enable a reduction in power supply complexity and weight for designers implementing their entire digital radio in a single chip.
Xilinx's latest CFR and DPD IP now support up to 100MHz of radio bandwidth in single RAT configurations in addition to supporting MC-GSM with frequency hopping in single RAT or multi-RAT configurations up to 75MHz. Coupled with NXP's Gen9 family of RF power transistors targeted for compact, efficient and high-performance LTE base stations, Xilinx radio IP enables customers to implement advanced radio architectures with fewer resources in less time and achieve power amplifier efficiency of up to 50% at 2.6GHz.
"Xilinx and NXP will continue to collaborate on future technology standards such as LTE-A and 5G, and expand the system impact with the most efficient and easy to adopt combination of radio algorithms and power amplifier technology," saidDavid Hawke, director of wireless communications at Xilinx.
About NXP Gen9 RF Power Transistors
NXP's Gen9 family of RF power transistors is specifically focused on compact, efficient and high-performance LTE base stations. Building on the excellent reputation already established by previous LDMOS generations, Gen9 delivers unprecedented efficiencies and excellent linearization capabilities for RF power amplifiers, at an industry-leading cost point. These ground-breaking devices represent a further step-up in performance for LDMOS transistors, having shown up to 5% more efficiency in Doherty applications.
Availability
The Xilinx PC-CFR V6.0 SmartCORE IP solution is available now for early access customers, and general availability is expected in January of 2015.
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