Freescale Semiconductor announced a new reference design for small office/home office (SOHO) base station applications that is partially powered by two advanced gallium arsenide (GaAs) monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMIC).

The comprehensive baseband-to-antenna reference design combines the QorIQ Qonverge BSC9131 base station system-on-chip (SoC) with Freescale RF radio boards, and is a multi-protocol solution that scales across a range of cellular bands to ease developers’ transition from 3G to 4G LTE. Sourcing the base station SoC and RF devices from the same vendor speeds time to market and helps ensure optimal compatibility and integration.

The Freescale GaAs MMIC devices deployed on the radio boards are the MMZ25332B and MMZ09312B amplifiers. Both MMICs provide exceptional linearity and power efficiency and can cover multiple bands, including Band 1/WCDMA and Band 13/LTE. Along with the radio board, the MMICs can be easily tuned to support multiple UMTS frequency bands.

“Creating comprehensive femtocell base station solutions using discrete components from multiple vendors is often cumbersome and expensive,” said Ritu Favre, vice president and general manager of Freescale’s RF Division. “By combining RF radio boards and our new GaAs MMICs with QorIQ Qonverge technology, we’ve created a one-stop-shop for femtocells that reduces development time and offers designers scalability as they transition from 3G to 4G.”

The QorIQ Qonverge BSC9131 device features a scalable architecture that supports a range of air interfaces, including LTE, LTE-FDD & TDD and WCDMA/CDMA. It combines Power Architecture® cores and high-performance StarCore DSPs with Multi-accelerator Platform Engine (MAPLE-B) technology for baseband processing. It also features interconnect fabric and next-node process technology, as well as glueless RFIC communication and antennae interfaces, eliminating the need for additional chips and reducing board space and cost.