Fabless semiconductor company Lime Microsystems has launched what it claims to be the world's first reference design for a MicroTCA broadband wireless transceiver. Targeted at small cell WiMAX base station applications—femtocells and picocells—the transceiver has 6 user-selectable channel bandwidths from 1.5MHz to 14MHz and can be digitally configured to operate in bands from 2GHz to 4GHz.
The re-configurable design supports a variety of network configurations, bandwidths and data rates. This minimizes costs and inventory for wireless system OEMs and operators.
Using a high level command set, the design can be configured for half-duplex and full-duplex operation in both frequency division multiplex (FDM) and time division multiplex (TDM) modes. The board can also be used as a "plug-and-play" transceiver for rapid evaluation and deployment of WiMAX base stations based upon ACTA or MicroTCA standards.
The zero-IF transceiver uses 12-bit baseband ADCs and DACs. A 40MHz sampling rate is derived from a low-noise clock. Its serial RapidIO interface supports a throughput of up to 3.125Gbps and can communicate via any advanced mezzanine cards (AMC) ports. A single port carries both I/Q and control traffic and an I/Q record and playback capability simplifies testing. A full speed USB interface is provided for PC controlled standalone operation.
The development platform will be available from December 1, 2007.
