Maxim Integrated Inc. and Freescale Semiconductor® have collaborated to showcase a comprehensive LTE/3G picocell base station at the 2013 Mobile World Congress. This innovative small cell base station platform design is field deployable by mobile operators and also serves as a production-ready reference design to accelerate time to market for equipment manufacturers.

Ideal for outdoor public access or enterprise small cell applications, the LTE/3G picocell brings together a Freescale BSC9132 base station SoC card, a Maxim MAX2580 RF transceiver card, RF power amplifiers, and network management cards — all in a passively cooled enclosure and weighing in at 6.8kg. The BSC9132 features two Power Architecture e500 cores and two StarCore® DSP cores, along with Freescale’s high-performance MAPLE-B2P baseband accelerator platform. The MAX2580 is an RF to Bits®, high-dynamic-performance LTE/3G radio transceiver. The BSC9132 and MAX2580 work seamlessly to deliver a complete multi-band, multi-standard small cell solution. 

Key Advantages

  • MAX2580: Operates in all LTE bands from Band 1 to Band 41 with selectable channel bandwidths from 1.4MHz to 20MHz; supports FDD-LTE, TD-LTE, and WCDMA modes; JESD207 data interface provides a seamless radio interconnect between the MAX2580 and BSC9132.
  • BSC9132: Supports multimode operation that enables it to process LTE-FDD/TDD and HSPA+ users simultaneously. It is engineered to address the performance and cost requirements of up to 20MHz single sector LTE-FDD/TDD. The BSC9132 can process 64 simultaneous users and handles 150Mbps downlink with 75Mbps uplink rates in 20MHz LTE-FDD/TDD mode, and 42Mbps downlink with 11.5Mbps uplink rates in 5MHz HSPA+ mode. 

Industry Commentary

  • “Freescale’s highly integrated QorIQ Qonverge™ BSC9132 device provides dramatic improvements in performance, power, and cost in a single, flexible architecture,” said Stephen Turnbull, Division Marketing Manager for Freescale’s Digital Networking Group. “Our collaboration with Maxim has helped bring to market a highly differentiated solution for outdoor small cell deployments.”
  • “Maxim’s MAX2580 RF to Bits transceiver delivers the required RF performance to implement state-of-the-art LTE/3G small cell base stations,” said William Chu, Executive Director of RF Solutions at Maxim Integrated. “We are excited to collaborate with Freescale and bring to market an innovative production-ready small cell base station design.”