SCIENCE

Cavium Networks, Kontron and Tata Elxsi have announced that they will showcase a compelling, high-performance wireless broadband solution at the Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona from February 14 to 17. This solution brings together the market-leading Cavium OCTEON II multi-core processor as part of Kontron's open standard hardware running Tata Elxsi's LTE eNodeB L2/L3 software stack.

Targeted at Macro base station manufacturers for use in single and multi-sector LTE eNodeB products, the joint solution offers 3GPP Release 8 compliant LTE Layer 2 and Layer 3 processing that is capable of delivering up to 450 Mbps of aggregate throughput from a single AdvancedMC module featuring the OCTEON II CN6335 cnMIPS64 6-core processor.

The combined Cavium, Kontron and Tata Elxsi LTE eNodeB solution will be demonstrated at the following booths: Cavium (Booth 2C05, Hall 2), Tata Elxsi (Booth 2C106, Hall 2) and Kontron (Booth 2A28, Hall 2).

The Cavium OCTEON II CN63XX processor family provides the highest performance and integration for next generation 3G/4G/LTE wireless base station platforms, providing up to 9GHz of compute with a large 2MB L2 cache, DDR3 memory controller, security acceleration for SNOW 3G and KASUMI, TCP/IP, DPI, QoS and packet processing acceleration. Revolutionary PowerOptimizer technology limits maximum power from 7 to 17 watts from low-end to high-end. The OCTEON II processors have been designed into a range of tier-1 OEM systems ranging from eNodeB to packet-core platforms and services rich wireless infrastructure gateways.

The Kontron AM4211 ATCA Mezzanine Card (AMC) module can be configured with ATCA node blades and MicroTCA platforms (Picostation, Microstation to Macrostation). It is designed to support 1x 10GbE to the front and software configurable interfaces to the Fabric with either 2x PCIe x4 or SRIO which expands its application usage when configuring systems in combination with standards based third-party Digital Signal Processing (DSP) AMCs.

For control plane functions the Kontron AM4211 provides GbE on Ports 0 and 1 connected to the CN6335 processor and is fully software compatible with previous generation Kontron AMC packet processing modules, AM4204, AM4210 and AM4220, all based on OCTEON Plus processors from Cavium Networks. It is configurable with the Kontron MicroTCA 1U carrier-grade platform OM6061.

Tata Elxsi has architected its LTE eNodeB L2/L3 protocol stack to leverage the advanced hardware acceleration capabilities available in Cavium's OCTEON II multi-core processors, thereby delivering market-leading performance and scalability. The Tata Elxsi L2/L3 protocol stack also exploits the ability of the Cavium OCTEON II to support multiple virtual operating systems including Linux and Simple Executive to accelerate data plane performance.

Tata Elxsi LTE eNodeB L2/L3 stack has been integrated with 3GPP Release 8 compliant Layer-1 implementations and tested with real UEs. The entire software stack has been architected in a highly modular fashion to offer flexibility to OEMs to make modifications to specific layers of the stack with ease, if required. Tata Elxsi also offers updates and upgrades to support newer platforms and advanced releases like Release 9 and beyond.

"LTE Operators' goals of maximizing coverage and capacity, while lowering total cost of ownership, mandate powerful solutions with small and flexible footprint and very low power," said YJ Kim, General Manager, Infrastructure Processor Group at Cavium Networks. "Proven 4G wireless software expertise from Tata Elxsi and telecom module expertise from Kontron enables breakthrough 4G base station solutions using Cavium's OCTEON II processors to meet these challenging goals."

"The speed at which we can collaborate and develop such a powerful design speaks volumes to 4G LTE equipment vendors who simply cannot waste any time to get to market," said Marc Leclaire, AMC, MicroTCA, ATCA Switch product manager at Kontron. "This highlights Kontron's capability for the communications market - help bring leading silicon and software innovations to market sooner by packaging them on common open standard ATCA, MicroTCA and AMC hardware."

"Through this partnership with leading silicon and hardware providers like Cavium and Kontron, Tata Elxsi offers proven LTE software with industry-leading performance that is both scalable and cost effective," said Nitin Pai, Vice President of Marketing at Tata Elxsi.