MWC 2011: Freescale promises a cell tower basestation….on a chip

QorIQ Qonverge. That jibberish, which I dare you to try and say three times fast, as actually an amazing new platform from Freescale Semiconductor that made its debut at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Its goal is to put all those huge cell phone towers littering our skylines out of business by compressing them down to the size of a microchip. Of course that probably won’t be the case, but the goal of this chip is to function as base stations that are just as powerful as those huge towers at public locations, such as buildings, bus stops, stadiums, femtocells, and more. This multicore chip takes the baseband unit of a cell tower, shrinks it down, and dedicates each core to the operation of a different baseband technology. A single chip can effectively support thousands of users simultaneously and provide simultaneous support for all mobile radio frequencies, including LTE, HSPA, and CDMA. As with any innovation of this scale, its goal is to drive down operating costs and effectively pass the savings on to customers as well. A rollout date was not revealed, but Freescale announced that it has four versions in the works to support different levels of usage and deployment with femtocell maker Airvana already on board with orders for the lower two of the four variations.

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