Xilinx in the Wireless Market

The wireless industry is transitioning from high-growth to a more mature state with cost pressures increasing across the wireless infrastructure market. This has lead to a dramatic consolidation among the main industry players, as each have sought to leverage the benefits-of-scale to provide more comprehensive product portfolios including improved wireless base station solutions and equipment for the core networks. Next-generation base station deployments must conquer the challenge of continually reducing cost (as measured by cost-per-channel) while adding increased functionality to support new services, protocols, and changing subscriber usage patterns. These challenges have produced a dilemma for manufacturers; on the one-hand they have seen the complexity required increase by an order of magnitude, while the selling price of typical base station has fallen from over $100K to less than $20K in under a decade. Such business and economic dynamics drive demand for innovative and low cost technical solutions to meet the markets requirements. Consequently, system architects are now developing common base station platforms capable of meeting new and evolving wireless standards.

This has lead in turn to a shift away from ASIC technology to more readily available off-the-shelf components, such as DSPs and FPGAs. Benefits of a Programmable Wireless Base Station The benefits of PLDs in wireless base station designs boasts a number of significant benefits such as faster time-to-market, cost savings (see Figure 1) and field upgradeability, while improving overall QoS and reliability of communications. FPGAs are leveraged as a complete ASIC replacement or as a companion to an ASIC or ASSP to support additional functionality.PLDs are successfully deployed in the latest wireless networks around the world. Through remote upgrades, service providers can dramatically extend the base station lifecycle while eliminating the need for costly truck rolls and hardware development. Implementing bug fixes, deploying new services and tuning system performance can be easily executed using a remote software download to reprogram the programmable device. For wireless networks consisting of tens of thousands of base stations, operators can benefit from dramatic OPEX savings of at least $10 million per base station network upgrade.

For example, DDI Pocket leveraged programmable technology to upgrade its entire network of 160,000 PHS base stations in 1,912 cities throughout Japan by simply downloading new software. At a cost saving of $300 per truck roll upgrade, the company effectively saved $48 million per upgrade.Enabled by the revolutionary ASMBL (Advanced Silicon Modular Block) architecture and advanced 65nm triple-oxide technology, the Virtex-5 architecture delivers more options, higher performance, and lower power to the wireless base station industry than any other FPGA family available today. With up to 352 GMACs (multiply and accumulates operations per second), the Virtex-5 family and XtremeDSP solution delivers programmable parallel DSP processing suitable to address the key elements of the baseband and radio module designs. Software Xilinx offers a complete line of development tools and kits, such as SystemGenerator and AccelDSP for DSP and the Embedded Development Kit (EDK) for embedded processor design. SystemGenerator for DSP and AccelDSP are integrated environments for developing and de-bugging high-performance DSP systems such as those found in wireless base stations.

The tools enable system architects to increase productivity by providing an “algorithm-to-silicon” design flow, from either the SimuLink or Matlab® design environment to the Xilinx FPGA. The EDK software tools accelerate the development of embedded systems built around the PowerPC® core and MicroBlazeTM soft processor, by easing the hardware/software partitioning process and automating the development/debug flows. Radio Solutions Radio cards and related equipment such as Remote Radio Heads are well positioned to benefit from programmable technology. Xilinx programmable solutions provide significant cost savings ranging from hundreds of dollars in development to over three million over the lifetime of a typical system. These cost savings are a result of the flexibility in the platform in which algorithms can be easily developed and adapted, enabling power savings, improved overall system reliability, and reduced Bill-Of-Material costs.Following the industry standardization of radio-to-baseband connectivity standards, Xilinx offers high performance wireless connectivity LogiCORE™ solutions. These solutions are optimized for Xilinx® 65nm Virtex™-5 LXT and SXT FPGAs and compliant with CPRI v2.1 and OBSAI RP3 & RP3-01 v4.0 connectivity standards.

The LogiCORE solutions enable wireless OEMs to leverage these industry-leading connectivity standards to drive down wireless base station design costs and power requirements, while allowing the interface to be easily adapted to their own specific requirements, or modified to support updates in the standard. The LogiCORE solutions include all necessary source-code VHDL files, data sheets, and test suites designed to meet the CPRI v2.1 and OBSAI RP3 and RP3-01 v4.0 specifications. Also included are constraints and design files for implementing on the Xilinx ML505 and ML506 development boards, available as part of the Virtex-5 FPGA family Xilinx Virtex-5 LXT and SXT FPGAs, with low power (100mW at 3.2 Gbps) Xilinx® RocketIO™ GTP transceivers, provide wireless designers with significant power savings of up to 77 percent in comparison to existing transceiver implementations.