UK-based LTE software and hardware developer CommAgility has licensed its technology to IDY of Japan in a research project to develop 4G and 5G small cells.
IDY is licensing CommAgility’s SmallCellPHY and SmallCellSTACK software which provide a complete LTE Physical Layer and LTE Protocol Stack for small cell eNodeB products.
CommAgility has integrated the software onto its dual channel AMC-K2L-RF2 RF transceiver card which uses the TCI6630K2L KeyStone II DSP/ARM SoC from Texas Instruments.
This integrates four C66x+ DSP cores with two ARM CortexTM-A15 cores for higher layer processing.
A TI AFE7500 analogue front end provides flexible RF I/O across the 700MHz to 3GHz band that covers 4G and 5G implementations.
CommAgility and IDY are working together, with support from CommAgility’s Japanese distributor StarBridge, to deploy the integrated hardware and software in a variety of 4G and 5G research and development programmes. The solution meets the demanding quality requirements for the Japanese market.
“CommAgility provides a proven system, with hardware and software integrated and tested. This means we can focus on achieving our R&D goals on the journey towards 5G, as well as offering our customers highly differentiated products,” said Kazuaki Honda, President at IDY in Tokyo. The company makes cellular networking devices for wide area and private narrow band infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT). The major product is a machine to machine (M2M) router for railways, power plants and factories.
CommAgility, based in Loughborough, UK, is part of the US Wireless Telecom Group that also includes Boonton Electronics, Microlab and Noisecom.
The companies provide RF and microwave components, modules, systems and instruments to the wireless, telecommunication, satellite, military, aerospace, semiconductor and medical industries.