5G New Radio IP reduces time to market
Complying to the 3GPP 5G New Radio (NR) Release-15 and software upgradable for Release-16, PentaG is a 5G intellectual property (IP) platform for enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), released by CEVA.
The IP is targeted at smartphones, fixed wireless access and other embedded devices that can take advantage of multi-gigabit data rates to enable services and use cases such as 4K video streaming, augmented reality, virtual reality, autonomous driving and home broadband.
PentaG builds on CEVA’s experience in developing DSP platforms for 2G, 3G and 4G LTE modem design, which is licensed and deployed by many of the world’s leading wireless communications semiconductor companies and smartphone OEMs.
To address the performance and technical challenges associated with 5G processing, PentaG was designed as CEVA’s most advanced set of technologies ever for a baseband architecture. It combines specialised scalar and vector DSP processors with an enhanced 5G instruction set architecture (ISA), specialised co-processors, accelerators, software and other essential IP blocks, in a configurable and modular architecture. PentaG includes an artificial intelligence (AI) processor that takes advantage of machine learning techniques to deliver up to eight times performance improvement for link adaptation workloads, compared to the conventional software approach, claims CEVA. Use of specialised co-processors and accelerators, such as Vector MAC Unit (VMU), PentaG achieves up to 50 per cent power savings for commonly used workloads, all within the low latency constraints and extreme throughput requirements of 5G NR.
Michael Boukaya, vice president and general manager of the wireless business unit at CEVA, said:“We designed PentaG to overcome the limitations of conventional DSP-based LTE/LTE-Advanced architectures, which simply do not scale to support 5G. The PentaG platform is powerful enough to support the most critical 5G NR functions in the most efficient manner possible, while offering the flexibility to allow customers to combine specific PentaG components with their incumbent technologies,” he added.
PentaG supports the full gamut of 5G eMBB use cases, including standalone (SA) and non-standalone (NSA), mmWave and sub-6GHz. The platform sustains a bit rate of up to 10Gbit per second and offers a scalable architecture to support most advanced wireless technologies like Massive-MIMO, beamforming and complex link adaptation schemes.
The PentaG platform is made up of specialised IP blocks. There is the Enhanced CEVA-XC4500 DSP with 5G ISA Extensions, based on the CEVA-XC4500 DSP, the 5G AI processor, a programmable and scalable processor that uses machine learning methods to enable advanced beamforming techniques and link adaptation scenarios as defined in 5G-NR Release15, Type-I and Type-II, using neural networks rather than a database search approach. There is also a selection of CEVA-X2 DSPs and the Polar and LDPC encoder and decoder accelerators.
A supporting hardware and software development environment includes an FPGA-based development board for immediate 5G software implementation and to accelerate modem development.
