Platform Divergence
Cellular services have evolved differently in different regions of the world and today there are several alternatives in use such as TDD (TD-SCDMA, TD-LTE) in China, CDMA in North and South America and 3GPP (W-CDMA, LTE) in Europe. As a result, handset developers typically have to produce many variant products. This divergence leads, in some cases, to many tens of chip sets and software platforms to develop, validate and maintain which reduces profitability and speed of response to market requirements.
Modem Complexity
The number of individual modem standards which a handset must support continues to grow. Legacy systems like GSM have to be maintained far into the foreseeable future to meet coverage, spectrum and OPEX demands. New standards are regularly created to address spectrum licensing opportunities and the need for increasing bit-rate, lower latency and better network efficiency. As a result, modern 3GPP smart phones now typically support GSM, GPRS, E-GPRS, W-CDMA, HSDPA, HSUPA, HSPA+ and LTE.
At the same time, as standards evolve, each successive system is significantly more complex than those before. LTE-Advanced (300Mb/s DL : 150Mb/s UL), for example, requires 100,000 times the Physical Layer processing performance of GSM. This increasing complexity combined with the need for ongoing multimode is increasing unit cost, time-to-market and risk..
Time For Change
Wireless baseband chips have traditionally been designed with a dedicated hardware block supporting each standard, or group of standards. Whilst this worked well for a small number of low performance systems such as GSM and CDMA, the diversity and complexity of modern wireless technologies noted above leads to an uncontrollable increase in die size (increased cost), increased power consumption (shorter battery life) and longer development times (late market entry). This is making a hardware ASIC design approach unsustainable going forward.
With the combination of a fully re-programmable Modem Compute Engine (MCE) and a powerful modem development environment, Cognovo's licensees can achieve die size and power consumption equivalent to state of the art in single mode modems. This is possible because the wireless-optimised MCE is re-used for each modem, allowing multimode to be incorporated with little penalty. Furthermore, the silicon roadmap is decoupled from the modem software roadmap, accelerating development timescales and increasing confidence in the ability to meet the ever reducing time to market.
