Xilinx meets performance requirements of LTE wireless systems with new LogiCORE Turbo Encoder and Decoder Solutions
(Technology News, 03 Jun 2008 )
Xilinx has announced immediate availability of performance-optimized programmable turbo coding solutions for LTE wireless systems. The new Xilinx 3GPP LTE Turbo Encoder and Decoder LogiCORE offerings deliver throughput speeds of up to 200 Mbps with the embedded digital signal processing (DSP) capabilities of Spartanｮ and Virtex field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to meet the voice and ever-increasing data communications requirements imposed on modern wireless systems by the evolving long-term evolution (LTE) standard.
Turbo Codes were first deployed commercially in 3G wireless systems, primarily WCDMA/HSDPA base station applications. These function as an error correction method to ensure the optimum transfer of communications with performance levels approaching the theoretical Shannon limit (maximum information transfer rate over a noisy channel). The combination of the new Xilinx turbo coding and XtremeDSP solutions address the even greater throughput demands of 3GPP LTE systems currently in development, in order to meet the aggressive system latency reductions proposed in the new LTE standard. The cores are also designed to rapidly adapt to new and evolving requirements, such as the evolution of TD-SCDMA into the proposed TDD variant of LTE.
The throughput delivered by the Xilinx 3GPP LTE Turbo Decoder LogiCORE solution exceeds the performance of competitive offerings by a factor of five. This enables developers to offload the complex, high-performance decoder function from the rest of the baseband solution, which in turn allows them to use more cost-effective DSP processors for the remaining less performance-critical baseband functions. Developers can also trade-off design size against throughput performance by simply selecting the number of processing units available to the decoder function within the Xilinx FPGA, thus ensuring that only the smallest possible device is needed to meet system performance criteria.
