The SC-RF2-5Gn78 from CommAgility combines 5G PHY and protocol stacks with hardware and I/O, forming a complete small cell base station.
With some 80% of mobile data consumed indoors, it’s no wonder that 5G small cells and repeaters are gaining attention. You can design a small cell from components or use a design platform that integrates RF and baseband hardware with the 5G PHY and DSP software needed to produce and process signals. The SC-RF2-5Gn78 card from CommAgility provides the components and IP needed to develop your own mid-band small cell on a single card.
The card integrates CommAgility’s SmallCellPHY-5G and SmallCellSTACK-5G software. The software runs on the card’s NXP Layerscape LA12XX SoCs, providing the physical layer interface between RF and baseband digital. It includes 16 Arm-based cores with NXP VSPA DSP cores.
Bits in the network side of the radio need formatting, which is where the SmallCellSTACK-5G software takes over. It provides a 3GPP Release 15-compliant protocol stack through Layer 3 (routing), which can then connect to the card’s GbE Ethernet port (10GbE optional). In addition, the SC-RF2-5Gn78 card supports and optional an SFP+ 10GBase-SR/LR optical port, two SMA antenna connectors, a USB port for diagnostics, and a GPS antenna connector.
The card operates from 3.4 GHz to 3.6 GHz, which covers 5G bands in many parts of the world, centered on the 3.5 GHz band in the U.S. The card supports two 40-MHz channels with 2×2 downlink MIMO with output power up to 14 dBm per channel. RF personality modules for the card provide frequency-specific filtering, amplification, and mixing.
