Next Generation Base Station Semiconductors

Technology Analysis

With the looming smartphone- and tablet-driven capacity “crunch” on mobile networks, service providers are deploying Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) with small cell underlays in dense urban areas and using distributed Radio Access Networks (RANs) to narrow the gap between capacity and demand, and all of these techniques are driving integration into the next generation base station baseband.

Unlike their predecessors these next generation multimode base station baseband processors are heterogeneous multicore systems on chip devices including both DSP and CPU cores for control and data plane processing along with hardware acceleration and increasing connectivity to accommodate backhaul and advanced antenna and radio interfaces.

This report profiles the next generation base station processor market and outlines the activities of Altera, Broadcom, Cavium, Coherent Logix, Freescale, Intel, LSI, Mindspeed, Octasic, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Vitesse, and Xilinx who are all active in this area.

Table of Contents

  • 1. EVOLVING RAN ARCHITECTURES DRIVE ADVANCED SOCS
  • 2. FROM ASICS TO A BASESTATION ON A CHIP
    • 2.1. ASIC
    • 2.2. Multiple Chip
    • 2.3. SoC
    • 2.4. Heterogeneous Multi-core SoC
    • 2.5. Many Cores versus Few Cores
    • 2.6. Interconnect Fabric
  • 3. CONNECTIVITY AND BACKHAUL
    • 3.1. RRH
    • 3.2. CPRI and OBSAI
    • 3.3. CRAN
    • 3.4. Digital Front-end and Antenna Interfaces
    • 3.5. Backhaul
    • 3.6. X2 Interface
    • 3.7. Timing Recovery in IP Systems
    • 3.8. Baseband on a Chip
  • 4. OUTLOOK FOR 2017
    • 4.1. Total Addressable Market for Baseband Silicon
  • 5. SEMICONDUCTOR VENDOR PORTFOLIO SUMMARIES
    • 5.1. Freescale Semiconductor
    • 5.2. Texas Instruments
    • 5.3. Cavium
    • 5.4. Mindspeed
    • 5.5. Broadcom
    • 5.6. Qualcomm
    • 5.7. Vitesse
    • 5.8. Intel
    • 5.9. LSI
    • 5.10. Coherent Logix
    • 5.11. Octasic
    • 5.12. Xilinx
    • 5.13. Altera

Tables

  1. Base Station Baseband Silicon TAM and SoC Penetration
  2. Selected Vendors Base Station Baseband Processor Features
  3. Base Station Classes, Site Characteristics for Indoor and Outdoor Femto-, Pico-, Micro-, and Macrocells

Charts

  1. Mobile Data Growth
  2. Macro Cell versus Small Cell versus Remote Radio Head
  3. Base Station Baseband Silicon TAM and SoC Penetration

Figures

  1. OSI Layers versus Silicon Implementation