CEA-Leti Unveils Low-Power Reconfigurable Multicore Chip For Software-Defined Radio and Cognitive Radio

GRENOBLE, France – July 22, 2010 – CEA-Leti announced today that it has developed a digital baseband circuit for software-defined-radio and cognitive-radio applications that features less than 50 microseconds (µs) for full reconfiguration and multi-applications support.

The MAGALI chip, developed for fourth-generation mobile phones, is based on CEA-Leti’s powerful mesh asynchronous network-on-chip (ANOC) infrastructure delivering 2.2GB/s/link. The chip includes 23 integrated processors dedicated to signal processing and bit-level processing associated with an ARM1176 processor for medium access control.

The most powerful innovations have been made on the reconfiguration side. For the first time, a full baseband circuit can be reconfigured in less than 50µs (maximum time), while typical test cases show a 4µs reconfiguration-time (average time observed). Moreover, a multi-application support allows the sharing of the computing units between two radio access technologies (RATs). These two features make MAGALI particularly relevant to software-defined-radio and cognitive-radio applications.

Power management has been a major optimization goal during the development of this chip. Based on the unique ANOC technology, 23 frequency islands can be programmed dynamically to ensure the best performance-versus-energy ratio. As a result, the circuit exhibits less than 500 mW for up to 40 giga operations per second (GOPS) performance, which is one of the best power efficiency measurements reported for a chip with a high level of flexibility.

MAGALI has been tested on a 3GPP-LTE application, delivering 50Mbits/s on a 4x2 MIMO scheme. It is integrated at present in a prototyping board used in two major European ICT projects, BEFEMTO www.ict-befemto.eu/ and ARTIST4G https://ict-artist4g.eu/

CEA-Leti presented the circuit at the flagship 2010 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) earlier this year in San Francisco.

About CEA-Leti

CEA is a French research and technology public organisation, with activities in four main areas: energy, information technologies, healthcare technologies and defence and security. Within CEA, the Laboratory for Electronics & Information Technology (CEA-Leti) works with companies in order to increase their competitiveness through technological innovation and transfers. CEA-Leti is focused on micro and nanotechnologies and their applications, from wireless devices and systems, to biology and healthcare or photonics. Nanoelectronics and microsystems (MEMS) are at the core of its activities. As a major player in MINATEC campus, CEA-Leti operates 8,000-m² state-of-the-art clean rooms, on 24/7 mode, on 200mm and 300mm wafer standards. With 1,200 employees, CEA-Leti trains more than 150 Ph.D. students and hosts 200 assignees from partner companies. Strongly committed to the creation of value for the industry, CEA-Leti puts a strong emphasis on intellectual property and owns more than 1,500 patent families. For more information, visit www.leti.fr.