Wavesat offers tri-band reference design for 4G wireless IC

The reference design for the OD9010 supports bands 3, 7, 20 for LTE and can be used to develop handset devices, USB dongles and consumer premises equipment. Wavesat CEO Raj Singh said the three bands cover roughly 90 percent of the potential designs, but his team is at work on a third reference design that would incorporate six bands.

Key features:

• Supports LTE (long-term evolution) and WiMax high-speed broadband protocols on same baseband IC.
• Features CAT-3 performance (100mb/s downlink/50Mb/s uplink)
• Supports FDD and TDD duplex schemes and comes with an LTE protocol stack including MAC, RLC, PDCP, RRC and NAS layers.

Technology drivers

The driving force behind Wavesat's business is that 4G networks need to be as seamless as 3G cellular.

"You need to be able to step off a plane in a foreign country and not worry whether your 4G phone will work," Singh said.

Wavesat launched its Odyssey 8500 in May 2008, for WiMax Wave 2, 802.11bg and next-generation personal handyphone networks.The company announced the Odyssey 9000 chipset in October 2009 and released a single-band LTE/WiMax reference design with it.

Wavesat's architecture employs a software programmable air-interface, leveraging DSPs, and hardware acceleration blocks and can scale to support CAT-4 (150Mb/s downlink) speeds.

For more information, please visit Wavesat's technology page.

A block diagram shows the Odyssey 8500's architecture, a precursor to the OD9010.