Xilinx unveiled its suite of silicon, software and IP solutions designed specifically to enable the programmable wireless base station as an alternative to ASIC solutions. These solutions are based upon the Virtex-4 multi-platform FPGA family. Enabled by the ASMBL (Advanced Silicon Modular Block) architecture and advanced 90nm triple-oxide technology, Virtex-4 FPGAs deliver more options, higher performance and lower power to the wireless base station industry. With up to 256 billion multiply and accumulate (MAC) operations per second, the Virtex-4 family delivers programmable parallel DSP processing suitable to address the key elements of the baseband and radio module designs. With a 10x higher DSP performance-cost ratio than previous generation FPGAs, and a unique "micropower" architecture which reduces power consumption to a mere 23µW/MHz (typical) per XtremeDSP slice, Virtex-4 SX is the ideal co-processor for programmable DSPs. The complete suite of reference designs and IP cores include: Radio Module, Crest Factor Reduction (CFR) , Digital Pre-distortion (DPD), Digital Up Conversion/Digital Down Conversion (DUC/DDC), Baseband Module, High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), Random Access Channel (RACH), Searcher, 3GPP (Third-Generation Partnership Program), 3GPP2TCC, Turbo Convolutional Codecs (3GPP TCC), Open Base Station Architecture Initiative (OBSAI) Interconnect, Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) Interconnect, Transport Module
SONET/SDH Framers, Ethernet MACs, Network and Control Plane Processing, ATM Cell Processing, System, Memory and Backplane Interfaces
Xilinx Development Tools and Kits
Xilinx also offers a complete line of development tools and kits, such as Xilinx SystemGenerator for DSP and the Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK), to help reduce time-to-market and ease development for wireless base station architects and designers.
Pricing and Availability
Xilinx Virtex-4 devices are shipping now with prices for the smallest SX25 device starting at $59.99 each for 25,000 unit quantities.
