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Product category: Design and Development Software
News Release from: CoWare | Subject: Signal Processing Designer
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 23 May 2006

System-level design takes WiMAX onboard

CoWare has developed a new WiMAX Reference Library integrated into CoWare Signal Processing Designer (formerly known as SPW).

CoWare has developed a new WiMAX Reference Library integrated into CoWare Signal Processing Designer (formerly known as SPW) Covering IEEE802.16/16e standards, this library will allow SoC design teams using the CoWare platform-driven ESL design solution, to reduce time to market introduction by six months for every product generation

The CoWare solution allows optimisation of WiMAX SoC implementation performance for the noise performance relevant in rural areas and interference performance in densely populated areas, both of which impact the operator's network capacity.

"We are happy to hear that the supply chain for WiMAX systems is now extended into the design tools area", said Ron Resnick, President of the WiMAX Forum.

"With CoWare onboard, solutions that enable WiMAX products to be optimised at the algorithm and architecture level are now more readily available".

"It's at these design levels where the network operators, who invest multi-hundreds of millions to one billion dollars for their networks, have the most to gain".

"Complex standards like WiMAX are implemented on platforms which evolve over time", said Johannes Stahl, Director of Marketing at CoWare.

"We are glad to be part of the growing WiMAX community with our platform-based ESL design solution that enables design teams to rapidly deliver optimised WiMAX chips to the market".

When system engineers start thinking about orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), the most complex operation that comes to mind is the fast Fourier transform (FFT), a common digital signal processing (DSP) operation.

Although the OFDMA principle based on FFT is responsible for the reliable transmission of high-speed data over a fading channel, much more needs to be done to OFDMA to make it a scalable, efficient, and robust system for network operators and end users.

In OFDMA, a whole range of randomisation, data packaging, coding, and frequency mapping takes place, which is controlled by a large set of protocol parameters that need to be specified and verified.

Also, support of multiple users and the allocation of resources of varying sizes from the OFDMA time-frequency grid to each of these users make OFDMA system design a highly-complex task.

CoWare's WiMAX reference library contains all OFDMA mechanisms and are ready to be used by designers; resulting in cutting their time from written specification to a working reference simulation by 3 months compared with having a team of two or three3 engineers developing all models from scratch.

Compared with other competing wireless access standards, such as ITU/3GPP's 3G cellular standard, the IEEE802.16/16e standard does not come with a clear set of minimum quality of service (QoS) targets.

Although the 802.16/16e standard contains a certain limit in overall and individual peak performance of the system, network operators will shop for the solution with the optimum performance.

This is because additional performance translates into top-line growth (selling more bandwidth) or bottom-line savings (using less networking equipment).

Optimisation of the WiMAX receiver system, across the range of possible scenarios, is a daunting engineering task and has to be solved long before actual hardware becomes available.

CoWare's solution with the new WiMAX library helps automate this task.

Platform-driven ESL design starts with the creation of new hardware and software components at the algorithm level.

These components are often complex, signal processing functions bound to a particular standard, just as in this case for WiMAX.

The algorithmic design includes modelling and performance simulation, as well as fixed-point optimisation, specifically for hardware components.

The new WiMAX Library for CoWare Signal Processing Designer provides ready-to-use reference systems, all delivered with source code, from which design teams can start to add their particular implementations and optimise them in the overall system context by executing Signal Processing Designer simulations on a server farm.

After that, Signal Processing Designer can package an entire subsystem into a SystemC peripheral model for CoWare Platform Architect where it is used for system-on-chip platform exploration and validation.

Furthermore, algorithms designed with CoWare Signal Processing Designer are often implemented as programmable accelerators using CoWare Processor Designer.

This integration into the CoWare design solution makes the new WiMAX Library a very powerful enabler for design teams that cuts six months off the overall schedule from specification to working products.

CoWare Signal Processing Designer WiMAX Library is available today, starting at US $18,000 list price for a one-year subscription.

The free trial version can be downloaded from the CoWare website.

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