LEUVEN, Belgium — IMEC announced a chip that can handle a variety of advanced forward error correction technologies used in a range of wide and local area wireless networks. The device is on part of an effort by the European research group to assemble a full suite of silicon for software-defined radio (SDR).
Separately, researchers here demonstrated SDR baseband and analog front-end chips running video over two simultaneous 2.4 GHz channels at rates approaching 100 Mbits/second. That's as much as five times the rate supported by any previous demo, they claimed.
IMEC's FlexFEC chip can handle the advanced turbo and LDPC forward error correction codes. The FEC technologies are used in a wide range of wireless nets including third generation cellular standards such as 3GPP and LTE, wireless networks such as 802.11n and mobile WiMax (802.16e) and broadcasting TV specs such as Europe's DVB-S2/T2.
The FlexFEC chip, a multiprocessor using a wide SIMD architecture, is competitive in throughput and power consumption with existing dedicated FEC chips, IMEC claimed."This could be a generic block for building many different kinds of chips," said Liesbet Van der Perre, group science director of wireless research at IMEC and a professor at the neighboring Catholic University of Leuven.
Van der Perre's team is about to release a second-generation analog front end for SDR. The 45nm Scaldio-2 chip can handle SDR transmissions spanning frequencies from 200 MHz to 6 GHz, and may even hit a range up to 10 GHz.
The group has also designed the so-called Bear chip, a baseband geared for SDR. Papers on both chips have been submitted for consideration at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in February.
"We have proven we can reach the power efficiency of dedicated radios," said Serge Vernalde, technical business director of nomadic embedded systems at IMEC.
In August, IMEC first demonstrated Scaldio along with two Bear chips enabling SDR transmissions at 216 Mbits/s. At an annual press gathering here, Van der Perre and two colleagues showed a demo using a single Bear baseband handling two simultaneous video streams over 2.4 GHz SDR links.
"I don't think anyone has achieved more than 20 Mbits/s so far" with SDR, she said. "The degree of flexibility of this platform also is extremely high because we can re-program in C" both the baseband and analog front end, she added.
"Many people have baseband flexibility, but still use dedicated radios," she said.
The group is working on many versions of the demo. Some will handle three video streams and support 5 GHz Wi-Fi, and others will demo SDR over 3GPP and LTE cellular standards.
