Date: 19/10/2010

LTE eNodeB reference design jointly by Tata Elxsi, CommAgility, and Radiocomp

Tata Elxsi, CommAgility, and Radiocomp have collaborated to develop the Long Term Evolution (LTE) Macro/Micro eNodeB reference design, using a MicroTCA system and Remote Radio Head. This solution is aimed network equipment OEMs, original design manufacturers and radio equipment vendors to quickly design and manufacture the product.

LTE Macro/Micro reference design comprises of 3GPP Release 8 compliant L2/L3 stack and PHY layer integrated with Radio Head. The Tata Elxsi solution supports industry standard channel bandwidths and MIMO configurations.

This solution from Tata Elxsi is designed with flexible SAP-based interfaces, allowing easy integration of third party components and product differentiator algorithms. The software stack is architected modularly for the advantage of flexibility allowing easy modifications in the future. The package also includes updates and upgrades to support newer platforms and advanced releases like Release 9 and beyond.

The demonstration system consists of a microTCA system including a chassis with Tata Elxsi's LTE system software, running on CommAgility's AMC-3C87F3 signal processing board together with Cavium Networks' OCTEON Plus multi-core MIPS64 processor. This is linked to the Radiocomp Remote Radio Head (RRH) over CPRI and then output as an OFDMA modulated RF signal.

CommAgility's AMC-3C87F3 provides a complete PHY layer and timing solution for LTE base-stations. The compact AdvancedMC based form factor card integrates DSP and FPGA processing elements with CPRI, Serial RapidIO (SRIO) and Ethernet interfaces, as well as a GPS receiver.

Radiocomp provides SDR-based Remote Radio Head systems and /CPRI/OBSAI interfacing technology for next generation LTE mobile broadband radio access networks.

The current configuration is tuned to support 10 MHz FDD 2x2 MIMO, but the system offers flexibility to support TDD, configurable bandwidths (5&20MHz),and MIMO configurations(4x4,2x4).

"By combining Tata Elxsi's industry leading software with hardware, we have been able to provide a powerful, optimized reference solution for OEMs that can scale to address single sector as well as multi-sector base stations. This helps in drastically reducing time to market, said Mr. Nitin Pai, Vice President, Marketing, Tata Elxsi Ltd.

"Further, as part of our product roadmap we are committed to support our customers with feature enhancements and updates to provide differentiated performance. Customers can leverage Tata Elxsi software, services and integration expertise to enable early product deployment into the rapidly growing LTE market""

"LTE base-stations are highly complex pieces of equipment and extremely difficult and expensive for OEMs to develop." said Edward Young, Managing Director of CommAgility. "This partnership brings best-of-breed hardware and software together to provide a complete, verified solution, available now and offering significant reductions in time to market and cost."

"We are extremely pleased about working with Tata Elxsi and CommAgility. The demonstration will showcase Radiocomp's leadership not only in CPRI/OBSAI, but also in Remote Radio Head technology for FDD-LTE at a time when the entire mobile industry is moving strongly towards LTE," said Mr. Christian Lanzani, Senior Product Manager for Radiocomp.