"With the advent of Remote Radio Head (RRH) base station topologies and the continuing demand on designers to meet shrinking time-to-market and cost targets, it has become more important than ever for silicon vendors to offer customers complete connectivity and processing solutions," said Stan Kopec, Lattice corporate vice president of marketing. "The LatticeECP2M value proposition of a low-cost FPGA fabric combined with embedded high-speed SERDES channels continues to gain traction in the wireless market. With the release of these most recent IP cores and reference designs, Lattice further enhances the value of our LatticeECP2M FPGAs by delivering complete wireless solutions."

The three designs being released include a Digital Up/Down conversion reference design (DDC/DUC) and IP cores supporting two popular industry standard baseband interface protocols, the Open Base Station Architecture Initiative (OBSAI-RP3-01) and the Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI). The DDC/DUC is a single channel, WiMAX reference design that leverages the embedded DSP blocks of the LatticeECP2M fabric to provide a highly integrated RF card solution. The DUC/DDC package also automatically configures the Lattice ispLeverCORE IP cores for the Finite Input Response (FIR) filter and Numerically Controlled Oscillator (NCO) functions.

Both the CPRI and OBSAI IP cores have been recently updated to address the expanding landscape of remote radio head base station deployments. The CPRI core is compliant with v3.0 of the specification, supporting 614M, 1.2G and 2.4Gbps data rates by virtue of the embedded SERDES channels in the LatticeECP2M FPGA family. The IP core also has been upgraded to address the concerns of latency variation and enhanced Fast C&M Ethernet control plane requirements that are required for multi-hop remote topologies.

The OBSAI core has been updated to support v4.0 of the specification, which adds a protocol overlay called RP3-01 to the preceding version in order to address the needs of a remote base station topology. Enhancements to the Transport Layer include support for the mapping of RP1 control plane data into an RP3 message, reducing connectivity by allowing both data and control plane messaging to be delivered over a common RP3 electrical link. Also offered is a unique mux/demux capability that further aids in the aggregation and distribution of multiple OBSAI links.

Keywords: lattice semiconductor corporation, wireless communications market, complete wireless solutions, interface protocols, ip cores, fir filter, silicon vendors, radio interface, station solutions, fpga family, corporate vice president, radio head, lscc, WiMAX