Radiocomp has released its local converter digital interface platform enabling investment protection of legacy RF base stations by smooth migration to optical base stations working with Remote Radio Heads over OBSAI or CPRI. Thereby, operators and service providers can ultimately protect their massive investments while at the same time taking advantage of remote radio heads for UMTS, CDMA, LTE, GSM and WIMAX. This results in better radio capacity and coverage as well as 50% less power consumption of the radio access, says the company.
The local converter is available immediately and Radiocomp says it has already signed a handful of OEM and sub-system customers utilizing the powerful technology to offer service providers better radio access performance and lower operational costs.
The local converter converts digital base band IQ and O&M channel data into high-speed OBSAI RP3-01 or CPRI standard formats enabling quick and reliable optical communication with Remote Radio Heads.
"Early on, we worked closely with our potential Remote Radio Head partners and learned that a significant challenge from a time to market and R&D cost perspective is the need for migrating what is already available – namely base stations with analogue RF interfaces – to base stations with optical interfaces. What's more, such a solution shall be flexible from an OAM integration perspective and have proven optical transport interfacing embedded such as OBSAI and CPRI. That is why we have created the local converter solution", says Christian Lanzani, senior product manager at Radiocomp.
Radiocomp's solution is sold either as a hardware solution or as a reference design that can be adapted to specific hardware form factor needs including AMC/MicroTCA. The embedded software is based on Radiocomp's market leading OBSAI and CPRI IP cores for UMTS, CDMA, LTE, GSM and WIMAX thereby allowing customers to take advantage of the most mature optical interfacing technology on the market for radio access networks.
The local converter includes features such as:
- Digital card for base station applications
- WIMAX/GSM/WCDMA/LTE/CDMA standards support
- Integrates high performance dual SERDES channels up to 3.072 Gbps
- Integrates Radiocomp's OBSAI RP3-01 and CPRI IP solutions as well as Ethernet MAC
- Digital Base Band IQ interface – Low speed serial interface or parallel interface
- Direct I/Os in LVDS format for high precision clock and synchronization references
- Local unit configuration and monitoring via RS232 /JTAG