Kit gets to grips with WiMAX basestation design

The Aspex WiMAX Development Kit is a platform for developers of advanced multi-antenna WiMAX wireless infrastructure products based on the 802.16d and emerging 802.16e standards.

The Aspex WiMAX Development Kit is a platform for developers of advanced multi-antenna WiMAX wireless infrastructure products based on the 802.16d and emerging 802.16e standards.

It consists of a PCI-X plug-in card containing Aspex's Linedancer processors, reference software for the 802.16d/e physical (PHY) layer, and an integrated Matlab testbench environment.

The integration with Matlab allows vendors to rapidly develop and validate advanced WiMAX features, such as multi-antenna beam-forming and MIMO, using the familiar Matlab system modelling environment to create typical usage scenarios and channel models.

The WiMAX PHY code executes in real-time on the Linedancer processors, and is fully integrated into the simulation loop for fast, accurate evaluation of the final system performance.

At the heart of the Aspex platform is the powerful Linedancer processor.

100% software programmable, and delivering more than 3x the performance of a 1GHz DSP, Linedancer enables cost-effective development and integration of true software defined radio systems.

In addition, Linedancer supports antenna diversity - adaptive antenna systems (AAS), space-time-coding (STC) and multiple input multiple output (MIMO) - with up to four RX and 4 TX antennas per device.

Alternatively, a single device can support multiple sectors for cost-effective urban infrastructure deployments.

Linedancer is fully scalable with a simple uniprocessor programming model, allowing vendors to "dial up" whatever performance is needed simply by adding more Linedancer chips to the system, making it an ideal choice for flexible and modular software defined radio infrastructure products.

The Aspex WiMAX PHY reference code implements all the mandatory features of the 802.16d/e physical layer, and also supports optional features such as subchannelisation and multi-antenna options, enabling initial infrastructure deployments to cover much larger footprints, or support greater throughputs.

The Aspex WiMAX PHY platform is completely software based allowing vendors to develop 802.16d/e solutions now, with confidence that they can be upgraded in the field or over-the-air as future iterations of the standards evolve.

Software defined platforms also speed product development and reduce risk, by allowing hardware design and system integration to be completed before standards are fully defined or algorithms finalised.

As the platform is 100% software-defined, there is significant scope for manufacturers to create highly differentiated products through added-value software IP for multi-antenna techniques or algorithm optimisation for enhanced system performance.

Through a network of system-level partners with significant system-level engineering resources, Aspex can offer customers other parts of the 802.16 solution, such as the MAC protocol, or can develop complete WiMAX-compliant subsystems to any required form factor or interface, allowing WiMAX vendors to undertake a low risk parallel development of an advanced multi-antenna basestation product based around the Aspex SDR platform.

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