Intel upgrades cellular processors for Edge
By Patrick Mannion -- EE Times -- September 9, 2003 (11:41 a.m. EST)
MANHASSET, N.Y. — Intel Corp. has made algorithmic and processing-speed upgrades to its Manitoba cellular processors, moves the company said will allow it to handle baseband and applications-processing requirements of Edge (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution) applications.
Paired with an RF front end from RFMD, the upgrade is designed to lower the development costs and speed time to market for developers hoping to ride the migration to Edge from GSM/GPRS. Intel is betting that migration is well underway.
"We see a rapid transition to Edge occurring right now, especially within the U.S." said David Rogers, marketing manager at Intel's PCA components group. Rogers said he doesn't expect Europe to follow suit. Quoting figures from IDC, he predicted the U.S. market would move from very few Edge subscribers today to over 15 million by 2007.
Initially introduced last February as the PXA800F, the Manitoba processor targeted GSM/GPRS applications. It included a 104/312-MHz XScale applications processor with 4 Mbytes of on-chip flash and 512 Kbytes of SRAM and a 104-MHz MSA baseband DSP with 512 Kbytes of flash and 64 Kbytes of SRAM.
An integrated power-management and hardware audio codec was also provided, courtesy of Dialog Semiconductor. The Layer 1 protocol was internally developed for the MSA, while the designers opted for TTPCom's GSM/GPRS Layer 2/3 stack to run on the XScale.
The new version of Manitoba, dubbed the PXA800EF, raises the MSA's clock rate from 104 MHz to 156 MHz and adds extra Layer 1 Edge-compliant software Intel developed internally using expertise acquired through its purchase of DSP specialist DSPC. The new version retains TTP-COM for the GSM/GPRS/EDGE protocol stack (Layers 2 and 3).
However, simply raising the clock speed may not be enough to make the new processor viable for Edge, according to Ehud Reshef, product manager for the Edge line of Comsys Communications and Signal Processing Ltd. (Herzelia, Israel.) "Besides just raising the clocking speed, it's important to also come up with more advanced silicon processing technology, as you really want to stay on the same power-consumption levels as GSM/GPRS," Reshef said.
While recognizing that increased processing is required in order to handle the three-fold increase in error-correction coding that goes along with a move to EDGE from GPRS, Reshef said there are other requirements. "It's not just clock speed. You have to ensure more efficient scheduling and support features such as incremental redundancy, the buffers for which raise the memory requirements."
He said memory required in the baseband at 64 Kbytes, "though it could be twice that depending on whether you use 8- or 16-bit accesses."
Intel's Rogers said memory requirements are easily handled by the PXA800EF's current implementation. "As for power, we've already implemented one of the lowest-power processor architectures out there — a few more MHz on the MSA won't make much difference to the power budget," he said.
The PXA800EF is sampling today, said Rogers, with production volumes expected in the first quarter of 2004. It has a list price of $30 in 10,000-unit quantities..
commsdesign.com |
