Complete CPRI reference design for 3G base station interconnects

June 8, 2005

PMC-Sierra announced the immediate availability of a complete Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) reference design that provides Base Station vendors with a significant time to market advantage by allowing low-cost prototype CPRI solutions to be quickly developed and validated. PMC-Sierra's offering is the industry's most complete standard product solution and provides a clear path to higher integration and lower cost CPRI solutions through the migration to a single chip ASSP solution for production systems.

The PMC-Sierra CPRI solution is already being deployed by major OEMs and has been successfully tested for interoperability with other CPRI implementations. It meets all the most demanding CPRI requirements including accurate delay calibration and high-quality clock recovery. With the PM7815 PALADIN Digital Correction Signal Processor already shipping in production OEM systems, PMC-Sierra has further solidified its role as a key vendor for 3G Wireless Base Station silicon.

Providing the Complete Solution

PMC-Sierra's complete CPRI reference design is comprised of three main components --

-- 10 Gigabit Ethernet Serializer/Deserializer (SERDES): PMC-Sierra is leveraging the superior signal integrity of its PM8358 QuadPHY 10GX SERDES device to implement the CPRI physical layer. The QuadPHY 10GX provides four low-jitter serial transceivers that are fully compliant to the CPRI electrical specifications and support simultaneous operation at all CPRI line rates. In addition, the QuadPHY 10GX supports a broad range of applications for high speed serial links such as XAUI, OBSAI RP3, Serial RapidIO, PCI Express, and Infiniband 4X.

-- CPRI Framing: The CPRI data link layer framing, delay calibration and control sub-channel insertion/extraction functions are performed separately in an FPGA device.

-- CPRI Frequency Synchronization: Discrete components are used to implement a circuit for cleaning and de-jittering a high stability master timing reference from the recovered serial line clocks.

"The availability of standard product solutions that meet interconnect specifications such as CPRI addresses the growing demand for standardized wireless base station architectures," said Bill Richardson, marketing manager for Wireless Products at PMC-Sierra. "By delivering these solutions, we are enabling our end customers to reduce their development cycles, achieve interoperability, and lower their time to market and overall development costs."