•  
• EDN Europe MAGAZINE
•  
• Free SUBSCRIPTION
• Subscription Renewal
• View Media Kit

• EDN
• EDN Australia
• EDN Asia
• EDN China
• EDN Japan

4M Wireless licenses LTE protocol software for 4G baseband

“Large fabless chip company” readies multimode baseband chipset for market with independent protocol stack

4M Wireless is a supplier of LTE protocol stack software; it has announced that it has licensed its technology to a fabless semiconductor company developing a 4G multi-mode baseband chip for LTE. The supplied stack is compatible with legacy 2G/3G protocol stacks as well as WiMAX stacks. 4M declined to name its customer but describes it as “a leader in its field”, with a presence, “in the US and Asia.” The chip company is, 4M says, developing 4G multimode baseband chip for handsets and handheld devices and will have a completely integrated 4G solution later this year, incorporating the LTE protocol stack with its physical layer. This will yield a small and low-power silicon offering tht will form the basis of a complete 4G multimode reference design for consumer device manufacturers.

4M Wireless has been developing its PS100 LTE protocol stack since the start of the specification process for 3GPP Release 8. The LTE stack is already in use with companies developing LTE technology and is being tested with leading eNodeB vendors and conformance test equipment suppliers. The PS100 is compliant to the latest version of the Release 8 LTE specification and has been ported to multiple embedded devices. The software is fully independent of operating system and hardware platform, and is designed to have a low memory footprint and optimum processor utilization. To simplify integration and interoperability testing, the PS100 comes supplied with a full set of test and debugging tools, supporting the sector that 4M characterises as the, “increasing number of mobile operators aiming for early deployment of LTE networks and require terminal devices…. [leading to] baseband chip vendors stepping up their efforts.”