Cognovo, the software defined modem developer based in Cambridge, has launched what it calls the industry’s most powerful soft modem processing engine.
It is the latest product in Cognovo’s Modem Compute Engine family of soft modem IP cores.
The company says the new engine takes the present LTE-capable MCE120 architecture to a new performance level by incorporating additional processing resources to meet the requirements of LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) and other algorithmically intensive applications, such as infrastructure.
The MCE160 is fully code compatible with MCE120, simplifying the process of upgrading designs from LTE to LTE-A, and is supported through Cognovo’s comprehensive suite of software development tools.
The licensable core is built around Cognovo’s Vector Signal Processor technology, spun out of ARM in 2009, and delivers in excess of 250 Giga operations per second of processing power.
LTE-Advanced is the latest broadband mobile communications system standardised within 3GPP and included within Release 10 in 2011. LTE-A builds on the capabilities of the LTE (Long Term Evolution) system, currently being rolled out by leading carriers in North America, Europe, and Asia to deliver faster broadband wireless services.
LTE-A provides peak downlink data rates up to 1Gb/s and widens the LTE specification through the aggregation of channels up to 100 MHz bandwidth, extended MIMO layers on both uplink and downlink plus the addition of co-ordinated multi-point.
This significant extension to the LTE specification means that a flexible and high-level system design approach, such as that enabled by the MCE160 core, is essential to achieve early and reliable deployment.
Pascal Herczog, Cognovo’s CTO, said: “The separation of hardware and software enabled by Cognovo’s soft modem technology provides a revolutionary environment for the realisation of the latest generation of wireless modems such as LTE and LTE-Advanced.
“Our customers’ development teams are already using the Cognovo tool suite to develop and validate their soft modem designs in simulation, independent of the silicon development flow.
“With the availability of MCE160 our customers can now move beyond LTE to create flexible basebands with the power to run LTE-Advanced modems purely in software.”
• Photograph shows: Pascal Herczog, Cognovo’s CTO
