Motorola aims to ease wireless development

IDG News Service - Motorola Inc. will help wireless infrastructure vendors build products at lower cost and with more flexibility through software and hardware, the company announced this week at its Smart Networks Developer Forum in Dallas, company officials said Monday.
The Schaumburg, Ill.-based network equipment company on Monday announced Reconfigurable Compute Fabric (RCF), an alternative to application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) for processing the data coming into wireless base stations from antennas. At the forum, Motorola demonstrated development tools and silicon based on RCF technology. RCF chips are designed to sit on the front lines of base stations, where data pours in quickly from antennas.
System makers typically use ASICs to handle the high volume of computations required for this job, said Arif Ahmed, strategic marketing manager at Motorola's radio frequency and digital signal processor (DSP) division. ASICs are relatively inexpensive but typically can't be reprogrammed to do new things or handle new protocols. RCF chips will be nearly as inexpensive as ASICs but will be much more flexible, he said.
There are three major standards for third-generation (3G) mobile data, Ahmed said: Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), CDMA2000 and Time Division Synchronous CDMA. Makers of base stations that want to be able to supply all types of networks today would have to develop three different ASICs or buy them from different vendors, he said. With RCF, they could use the same hardware and program it differently for the various standards. RCF chips also could be updated to support new capabilities, such as "smart antenna" technology for reducing call interference. By avoiding long hardware development cycles, system makers could bring new products to market more quickly, Ahmed said.
The RCF chips won't require Hardware Description Language coding and will be fully programmable in C and assembly languages. Metrowerks Inc. in Austin, Texas, expects to offer for RCF programming its CodeWarrior development environment, which also can be used for digital signal processing (DSP) and central processor software development, according to Motorola.
Motorola DSPs and RCF chips together will be able to perform all elements of 2.5G and 3G baseband processing, said the company. They also can work with Motorola PowerPC processors in base stations that communicate with mobile devices and control the communication, Ahmed said.
Motorola also said it expects to announce specific RCF products at its Smart Networks Developer Forum Europe in June.
Also Monday, Motorola announced its Smart Wireless Network Interface (WNI) Version 1.1. This software package for Motorola's programmable network processing units (NPU) is intended specifically for deploying those NPUs in

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