Abstract
Cellular Infrastructure seems to be a fertile ground for new and sometimes not so new architectural ideas. Start ups as well as mature companies propose variants on software defined radio, reconfigurable architectures and dedicated chip sets. However the bulk of modems today have remained a combination of digital signal processors and ASICs. The demise of the DSP has been predicted many times over the last decade and yet it remains a strong part of cellular infrastructure. So what changes are really happening? In this paper we take a methodical approach to this question by first identifying the forces that are driving the industry today, and then deducing the architecture evolution implied by these forces. We discover that software defined radio and reconfigurability do indeed play a role but perhaps not in the way many suspect.
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Alan Gatherer is the CTO for the Communications Infrastructure Business at Texas Instruments. He is responsible for all strategic development of TI's digital baseband modems for 3G and 4G wireless infrastructure. Alan joined TI in 1993 and has worked on various digital modem technologies including cable modem, ADSL and 3G handset and basestation modems. He was elected to Senior Member of Technical Staff in 1996 and then to Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in 2000. Alan also served as the manager of the wireless cellular communications group in R&D. Alan has authored seven journal papers and 22 conference papers and is regularly asked to give keynote and plenary talks at communication equipment conferences. In addition, he holds 43 awarded patents and is author of the book “The Application of Programmable DSPs in Mobile Communications.” Alan holds a bachelor of engineering in the area of microprocessor engineering from Strathclyde University in Scotland. He also attended Stanford University in California where he received a master's in electrical engineering in 1989 and his doctorate in electrical engineering in 1993.
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Gatherer, A. Market and Technology Drivers for Cellular Infrastructure Modem Development. Wireless Pers Commun 38, 43–53 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-006-9025-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-006-9025-x