The new ConnX Baseband Engine builds on Tensilica’s customizable Xtensa LX dataplane processor (DPU) technology and leverages the proven Vectra LX DSP engine option to become one of the fastest DSP cores on the market. The ConnX Baseband Engine is ideal for emerging baseband PHY standards, especially those using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) transmission.
Easy programmability, including automatic vectorization for ANSI C programs, and optimized instructions for fast complex FFT (Fast Fourier Transform), FIR (Finite Impulse Response) filters, and complex matrix operations make the new architecture particularly suitable for low-cost base station designs, femto-cell projects, digital media broadcast receivers and software-defined radio handsets.
“Our engineers have utilized the full extent of our customizable DPU technology to make the ConnX Baseband Engine,” stated Chris Rowen, Tensilica’s chief technology officer. “We’ve added over 200 baseband-specific instructions for compute-intensive functions that slow down other DSP cores. By making this into a 3-slot VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) machine with up to two load/stores plus one MAC (Multiply Accumulate) and one ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) operation per cycle, we get outstanding performance for challenging 4G data throughput requirements.”