Microwave Engineering Europe - October 2007 - (Page 46)

46 4G at 700 MHz 4G chips to target 700 MHz applications hip designers for cellular and WiMax networks are making plans for 700-MHz support after new guidance from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on the spectrum. A race is on to determine who will have what chips with what performance dynamics ready when new spectrum owners start planting towers as early as February 2009. Qualcomm is working to characterize its current and future CDMA technologies for 700 MHz with initial chips shipping next year. WiMax players are readying both products and standards for the 700-MHz opportunity. Proponents of the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) version of cellular are still completing their speciﬁcations, and work is under way on products for High Speed Packet Access Plus (HSPA+). “This is a very, very exciting time in wireless, with a lot of interesting high-performance technologies coming out that should deliver horsepower that customers will really feel in the form of new applications,” said Bill Krenik, manager of advanced wireless architectures for Texas Instruments Inc. Much of the excitement stems from the FCC’s decision to make 700 MHz, like the Internet, available to any device or application, something today’s cellular carriers do not allow. “That this spectrum could get deployed with no lock or block is something that just doesn’t exist in the U.S. today,” said Sriram Viswanathan, an Intel Capital vice president who runs Intel’s WiMax program and lobbied for the ruling. In the end, carriers that win the spectrum will choose a technology based on the lowest dollar per bit per hertz, the Intel exec said. WiMax supports channels as wide as 20 MHz, compared with 11 MHz for Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB). And UMB and LTE are based on intellectual property closely held by a few companies such as Ericsson, Nokia and Qualcomm. “WiMax is built on a fairly broadly held patent portfolio,” Viswanathan said. “I think the incumbent operators, should they get the spectrum, will deploy UMTS and CDMA and their respective broadband upgrade paths of LTE and UMB,” said Craig Mathias, principal of wireless consulting ﬁrm Farpoint Group. “But I’d like to see a single, all-IP network deployed, which means WiMax or even something else could be the wireless technology of choice going forward.” WiMax does not have a deﬁned proﬁle for 700 MHz yet, but Intel and others said one is in the works. “All the current WiMax chip providers will be in the [700-MHz] market, and those who don’t C A comparison of emerging wideband technologies. have the luxury of their own RF transceivers will join with companies that do have the RF, like Freescale, TI and Maxim,” said Will Strauss, principal of market watcher Forward Concepts. TI is supplying WiMax chips to Motorola, which will supply systems for a WiMax network Sprint will deploy in early 2008. Krenik would not reveal details of those chips or say whether TI has plans to support 700 MHz for any of the other technologies. Krenik did note that HSPA+, based on release 7 of the 3GPP standard, will be a contender for 700-MHz networks because it can deliver throughput of up to 25 Mbits/second on a 5-MHz channel. LTE is also a contender and delivers up to 10 Mbits/s to the terminal, although that requires a 20-MHz channel. But the LTE standard is still not completed. “Deploying LTE in early 2009 [when the 700MHz spectrum is available] would be aggressive,” said Krenik, noting that Japan’s Docomo has a test LTE network running in its lab today. “One thing I lose sleep over is whether the technology road maps will slip, and I will have to deploy an interim solution before one of these 4G technologies is ready,” said Stagg Newman, CTO for Frontline Wireless, a startup that hopes to buy some of the new spectrum rights. “This is one of the more complex bands,” said Peter Carson, senior product manager of next-generation cellular chips at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. The 700-MHz band will carry two-way broadband networks for commercial and public safety applications as well as highpowered digital TV broadcast for services such as Qualcomm’s Media- FLO mobile-TV network. The FCC is still reﬁning the rules on how all those services will work. “We did a ﬁrst round of analysis [of the Qualcomm chip designs] based on a lot of assumptions about the regulations,” said Carson. “Now we are doing a second round of analysis based on the most recent ruling. We expect to be able to be more speciﬁc in a month or two.” Qualcomm plans to ship a quad-band chip set supporting 700 MHz for its existing EvDO Rev A and B technology in time to enable systems launches for expected deployments starting in 2007. A similar chip set for its nextgeneration Rev C technology, also called UMB, should be ready by June 2009 at the latest. The Rev A technology promises peak physical layer data rates of 3.1 Mbits/s down to a terminal and 1.8 Mbits/s up from a terminal. Rev B can support three such channels, and Rev C boosts theoretical peak bandwidth to 40 to 80 Mbits/s. Carson said cellular technologies such as UMB have an advantage over WiMax because they use frequency-division multiplexing rather than time-division multiplexing. TDD can cause throughput to fall off dramatically at the edge of a cell site, he said. TI’s Krenik said carriers can adjust TDD networks to optimize them for actual trafﬁc patterns, mitigating the problem. Intel’s Viswanathan said both the IEEE and the WiMax Forum are developing FDD standards for WiMax, though they will not be completed until late next year. For its part, Intel is sampling prototypes of its Echo Peak chip set, which supports both 802.11n and WiMax. It will be part of Intel’s Montevina notebook platform, shipping in late 2008. This article has been reprinted courtesy of EE Times: Editor Rick Merritt. Microwave Engineering Europe ● October 2007 ● www.mwee.com 046_MWEE.indd 46 21/09/07 13:41:44 http://www.mwee.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Microwave Engineering Europe - October 2007

Microwave Engineering Europe - October 2007 Contents Comment News CMOS RF: Si-On-Sapphire Goes Mainstream Cover Feature: New Data Protection Concept for UHF RFID Tags CMOS RF: RF Design Team Touts CMOS Spin for 3G PAs Wireless HID – Are You Following the Standard to Another “Average” Product Development? Phase Optimisation of the RF Front-End Direct Synthesis of UWB-WiMedia Signal Generation 4G Chips to Target 700 MHz Applications Femtocells Mobilize to Fight Wi-Fi in the Home Products Product Feature: AXIEM Pioneers the Future of EM Technology Calendar

Microwave Engineering Europe - October 2007

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