Hosted by Alix Paultre, the Tinker’s Toolbox is the Advantage Design Group’s web-based interview show where we talk about the latest technology, components, and design issues for the electronic design engineering community.
In today’s podcast we talk to Charles Sturman, VP Sales & Marketing of Cognovo about intelligent wireless networks. An ARM spin-out, Cognovo’s Software Defined Modem (SDM) technology enables partners to create flexible multi-mode devices capable of operating a dynamic mix of cellular, wireless and broadcast standards such as HSPA+, LTE, LTE-A, WiFi, WiGig, DVB, DMB.
Here is a link to the podcast in case the play button is not visible: Cognovo Interview
Here is a recent release from the company:
Cognovo, the software defined modem developer, today announces the availability of MCE160, the industry’s most powerful soft modem processing engine. This is the latest product in Cognovo’s Modem Compute Engine family of soft modem IP cores, taking the present LTE-capable MCE120 architecture to a new performance level by incorporating additional processing resources to meet the requirements of LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) and other algorithmically intensive applications, such as infrastructure.
The MCE160 is fully code compatible with MCE120, simplifying the process of upgrading designs from LTE to LTE-A, and is supported through Cognovo’s comprehensive suite of software development tools.
The licensable core is built around Cognovo’s Vector Signal Processor (VSP) technology, spun out of ARM in 2009, and delivers in excess of 250 GOp/s (Giga operations per second) of processing power.
LTE-Advanced is the latest broadband mobile communications system standardised within 3GPP and included within Release 10 in 2011. LTE-A builds upon the capabilities of the LTE (Long Term Evolution) system, currently being rolled out by leading carriers in North America, Europe, and Asia to deliver faster broadband wireless services.
LTE-A provides peak downlink data rates up to 1Gb/s and widens the LTE specification through the aggregation of channels up to 100 MHz bandwidth, extended MIMO layers on both uplink and downlink plus the addition of co-ordinated multi-point. This significant extension to the LTE specification means that a flexible and high-level system design approach, such as that enabled by the MCE160 core, is essential to achieve early and reliable deployment.
Pascal Herczog, Cognovo’s CTO, said “The separation of hardware and software enabled by Cognovo’s soft modem technology provides a revolutionary environment for the realisation of the latest generation of wireless modems such as LTE and LTE-Advanced. Our customers’ development teams are already using the Cognovo tool suite to develop and validate their soft modem designs in simulation, independent of the silicon development flow. With the availability of MCE160, our customers can now move beyond LTE to create flexible basebands with the power to run LTE-Advanced modems purely in software.”