Tensilica Announces High-Performance ConnX Baseband Engine for LTE and 4G Wireless DSP Handsets and Base Stations

Market Wire, June, 2009

Tensilica,® Inc. today announced the first member of its new ConnX family of digital signal processor (DSP) cores for system-on-chip (SOC) design. The ConnX Baseband Engine enables efficient baseband processing for 3G, LTE (Long-Term Evolution) and 4G wireless equipment with its scalable, high-performance DSP architecture that provides industry leading computational throughput of 16 18-bit MACs per cycle. The ConnX Baseband Engine features an optimized instruction set, high memory bandwidth, scalable clustering, and efficient compiler support with an easy programming model for SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) vectorization and other DSP functions. This high performance core is also an effective solution for multi-standard fixed and mobile DTV broadcast demodulators.

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."

Architected for 4G and Beyond

While the ConnX Baseband Engine can be used in 3G applications, the architecture of the ConnX Baseband Engine is designed anew for 4G and beyond. It is designed for 8-way SIMD and 3-way VLIW for maximum throughput. It has two 160-byte vector register files supporting 20bx8 and 40bx4 vector types for DSP operations. It is extremely efficient at matrix operations, and offers rich vector operations with complex arithmetic support. It can do four complex FIR taps per cycle and one Radix-4 FFT butterfly per cycle.

Optimized Instruction Set

The ConnX Baseband Engine achieves this efficiency with an application-specific instruction set optimized for DSP functions with native support for FFT, FIR filters, and complex matrix operations. By implementing many functions in hardware, the ConnX Baseband Engine gets the performance needed for 4G applications. Special features include:

--  Aligned and unaligned vector load and store instructions for 16-
    bit(20b) and 32-bit(40b) data
--  Vector operations: ADD, SUB, MIN, MAX, NEG, ABS, MUL, DIV
--  Complex vector operations: CMUL (REAL, IMG), CMAG (magnitude squared),
    and complex conjugate functions
--  Radix-4 FFT butterfly operations
--  Multiple addressing modes: circular, bit-reverse addressing
--  SIMD reciprocal square root - 4-way on 40-bit operations
--  SIMD divide - 8-way on 20 bit operations
--  Extended precision fast FIR - 4 x (40-bit, 40-bit) complex taps/cycle
--  16 x 18-by-18-bit multiply-add instruction per cycle
    

The ConnX Baseband Engine joins the proven quad-MAC Vectra DSP option, which is now re-branded as the ConnX Vectra Engine. The ConnX Vectra Engine has been used in many customer designs and is an integral part of the re-branded ConnX 545CK. The ConnX 545CK was previously known as the Diamond 545CK, which received a BDTIsimMark2000(TM) score of 3820. The BDTIsimMark is a summary measure of overall DSP processing speed based on BDTI's DSP Kernel Benchmarks(TM)*, and the 545CK received the highest BDTIsimMark2000 score of all licensable cores evaluated by BDTI. The ConnX family of DSP engines includes other functions that are in high demand for next-generation compute-intensive tasks. Tensilica expects that it can quickly leverage its customizable processor technology to develop key functions that will significantly expand its business in several market areas.

High Memory Bandwidth

The ConnX Baseband Engine provides basic data memory bandwidth of 32 bytes per cycle. While this is adequate for many applications, the ConnX Baseband Engine provides the highest memory and interconnect bandwidth in the industry with direct pipeline access to multiple processors and memories with very wide ports using Tensilica's proven Queue (FIFO) capability. Queues can sustain data rates as high as one transfer every clock cycle or up to 350 Gbits/sec. The high bandwidth and low control overhead of Queues allows the ConnX Baseband Engine to be used in applications with extreme data rates.