Lattice Semiconductor has partnered with Affarii Technologies to demonstrate a Remote Radio Head (RRH) solution at 1300mW per antenna. The integration of all RRH processing has been achieved on a single LatticeECP3-150 device, part of Lattice’s LatticeECP3 FPGA family. The single chip solution supports 2x2 MIMO configurations for WCDMA, LTE and WiMAX applications and is part of an overall RRH hardware evaluation platform jointly developed by Lattice and Affarii.

The platform is comprised of the RF front-end, high-speed data conversion devices and the digital signal processing portion. The functionality of the full signal path package includes DDC/DUC, DPD, CFR and CPRI IP cores, supports multi-carrier waveforms up to 20MHz bandwidth and is compatible with Class AB and Doherty amplifiers using LDMOS and GaN transistors. All features of this RRH solution, both hardware and soft IP, are fully integrated and supported by Lattice’s latest generation of design tools.

The RRH Solution

The RRH solution is built using Affarii’s digitalTRX technology that includes Digital Up/Down Converter (DUC/DDC), Crest Factor Reduction (CFR) and Digital Pre-Distortion (DPD) functionality. When used with industry standard Doherty amplifiers the Digital Pre-distortion solution provides up to 30dB of ACLR correction with PA output efficiencies exceeding 40%, allowing flexible and efficient RRH designs.

The solution is fully customizable, with end applications including WCDMA, LTE, WiMAX, and DVB-T/S/H. The RRH solution is supported by a development and test environment that includes GUI-based design simulation, performance analysis and a production test API with design examples.