IQ-Analog Corporation, a developer of wideband transceiver products, has announced that its patented Traveling Pulse Wave Quantization technology that enables advanced data conversion has been used by NXP Semiconductors in their recently announced Layerscape Access family of fully programmable baseband products for 5G Access Edge systems.
Emerging 5G systems can support more than 10 times greater bandwidth per antenna and require more than 10 times the number of antenna elements over prior LTE systems, resulting in more than 100 times greater demands on the data conversion interfaces. This bottleneck was addressed by IQ-Analog in the development of a fundamentally unique approach to high-speed data conversion known as Traveling Pulse Wave Quantization or TPWQ. TPWQ was initially developed and demonstrated to customers in 2017 and was shown to offer 50 times lower cost and four times lower power consumption than commercially available systems.
IQ-Analog's FinFET technologies enable emerging 5G networking solutions, as well as provide compelling architectural advantages in 4G LTE-Advanced network deployments supporting massive MIMO and active antenna systems (AAS) with unprecedented enhanced multi-beamforming and tracking. This affords systems with significantly lower cost, power consumption, and die size over competitive solutions for macrocell base-stations, small cell access points and customer premises equipment (CPE). IQ-Analog is also commencing engagements with mobile handset SoC suppliers for 5G transceiver user equipment (UE) solutions.
According to the senior vice president and general manager of NXP's Digital Networking Solutions, Tareq Bustami, the company’s recently announced Layerscape Access processors offer the flexibility and performance required to enable rapid 5G deployments. By integrating IQ-Analog's 4 and 16 Giga-sample per second (Gsps) high-speed converter technology, they are also able to deliver a more differentiated 5G solution for their OEM customers. The performance benefits of these highly integrated solutions manifest in scalable architectures for small cell and mmWave products.
According to Michael Kappes, CEO of IQ-Analog Corporation, data converters are the bridge between antenna panels and digital processors. Efficient high-speed data converter technology is the dominant barrier limiting the expansion of 5G equipment. Their patented Traveling Pulse Wave Quantization technology offers fundamental advantages over commercially available high-speed data conversion systems. Matured in FinFET CMOS, IQ-Analog’s technology allows for cost-effective monolithic integration of high-speed data conversion and digital signal processing as exemplified in their wideband transceiver products and NXP's Layerscape Access family of 5G processors.
