Tata Elxsi, CommAgility, and Radiocomp collaborate to demonstrate LTE eNodeB Reference Architecture Using a MicroTCA and Remote Radio Head

Tata Elxsi, CommAgility, and Radiocomp collaborate to demonstrate LTE eNodeB Reference Architecture Using a MicroTCA and Remote Radio Head

Bangalore -- October 19, 2010  -- Tata Elxsi, CommAgility, and Radiocomp today announced their collaboration to produce the world’s leading Long Term Evolution (LTE) Macro/Micro eNodeB reference design, using a MicroTCA system and Remote Radio Head. This solution helps to accelerate time to market for network equipment providers, original design manufacturers and radio equipment vendors.

The LTE Macro eNodeB reference design will be demonstrated at Tata Elxsi booth (117) at 4G World 2010 (18-21 October) in Chicago.

LTE Macro/Micro reference design comprises of 3GPP Release 8 compliant L2/L3 stack and PHY layer integrated with Radio Head. This solution offers a ready platform for OEMs to get to market quickly, with minimized risk and cost. The Tata Elxsi solution supports industry standard channel bandwidths and MIMO configurations, and has been optimized to provide market-leading performance with reduced latency.

Tata Elxsi's state-of-the-art solution is designed with flexible SAP-based interfaces, allowing easy integration of third party components and product differentiator algorithms. The entire software stack has been architected in a highly modular fashion to offer flexibility for OEMs to make modifications specific layers of the stack with ease, if required. The package also includes updates and upgrades to support newer platforms and advanced releases like Release 9 and beyond.

The demonstration system consists of a microTCA system including a chassis with Tata Elxsi's LTE system software, running on CommAgility's AMC-3C87F3 signal processing board together with Cavium Networks’ OCTEON® Plus multi-core MIPS64® processor. This is linked to the Radiocomp Remote Radio Head (RRH) over CPRI and then output as an OFDMA modulated RF signal.

CommAgility’s AMC-3C87F3 provides a complete PHY layer and timing solution for LTE base-stations. The compact AdvancedMC based form factor card integrates DSP and FPGA processing elements with CPRI, Serial RapidIO (SRIO) and Ethernet interfaces, as well as a GPS receiver.

Radiocomp provides state-of-the art SDR-based Remote Radio Head systems and /CPRI/OBSAI interfacing technology for next generation LTE mobile broadband radio access networks. Radiocomp has been a leading force for several years in ensuring the industry-wide adoption of CPRI/OBSAI technology. It also helps in development and delivery of IP and reference CPRI/OBSAI designs to leading OEMs worldwide.

The current configuration is tuned to support 10 MHz FDD 2x2 MIMO, but the system offers flexibility to support TDD, configurable bandwidths (5&20MHz),and MIMO configurations(4x4,2x4).

"By combining Tata Elxsi's industry leading software with hardware, we have been able to provide a powerful, optimized reference solution for OEMs that can scale to address single sector as well as multi-sector base stations. This helps in drastically reducing time to market, said Mr. Nitin Pai, Vice President, Marketing, Tata Elxsi Ltd.

“Further, as part of our product roadmap we are committed to support our customers with feature enhancements and updates to provide differentiated performance. Customers can leverage Tata Elxsi software, services and integration expertise to enable early product deployment into the rapidly growing LTE market".

“LTE base-stations are highly complex pieces of equipment and extremely difficult and expensive for OEMs to develop.” said Edward Young, Managing Director of CommAgility. “This partnership brings best-of-breed hardware and software together to provide a complete, verified solution, available now and offering significant reductions in time to market and cost.”

“We are extremely pleased about working with Tata Elxsi and CommAgility. The demonstration will showcase Radiocomp’s leadership not only in CPRI/OBSAI, but also in Remote Radio Head technology for FDD-LTE at a time when the entire mobile industry is moving strongly towards LTE,” said Mr. Christian Lanzani, Senior Product Manager for Radiocomp.

About Tata Elxsi

TATA Elxsi is a global technology services and product design company, and the embedded product design arm of the 70 Billion US$ TATA group.

With operations in US, Europe and Asia, TATA Elxsi is a strategic partner to the world’s leading equipment makers and service providers.

Leveraging over 20 years of exclusive focus on wireless and communications technologies and embedded product development, TATA Elxsi enables customers with stacks, integrated solutions, and a world-class engineering team to help customers deploy carrier-class LTE, WiMAX and Femtocell products – helping reduce time-to-market, costs and risk.

TATA Elxsi’s engineering expertise and services span the entire communications ecosystem including system architecture, development and testing, product maintenance and test automation, for devices and infrastructure.

About CommAgility:

CommAgility is a leading manufacturer of signal processing AMC modules for wireless baseband applications, combining flexible CPRI/OBSAI antenna interfaces, the latest TI DSPs and Xilinx FPGAs, and high bandwidth on and off-card communications using Serial RapidIO and Ethernet. Customers around the world use CommAgility products to develop high performance applications in both wireless and non-wireless spaces, and recent designs include test equipment, trial systems and base stations for a wide range of wireless standards especially LTE and WiMAX. Website: www.commagility.com

About Radiocomp:

Radiocomp, acquired by MTI Group in Oct, 2010, is a global pioneer within the developing and manufacturing of state-of-the-art fully software-configurable and remotely tunable radio head products and radio components, and a leading provider of modular RF systems and components for existing and next generation mobile and wireless infrastructure networks. Radiocomp is an expert within research and development as well as the application of RRH to WiMax/3GPP LTE mobile technologies, developing custom system design solutions. With the acquisition, MTI Group – which is already recognized internationally as a global leader in supplying RF and microwave products – combined its hardware and software R&D capabilities, facilitating its business expansion into the 4G market. For more information, please visit www.radiocomp.com and www.mti.com.tw