Recently several members of our team were reminiscing about the early days of cellular wireless, and I thought it would be fun to share the “then” and “now.” While it seems like a lifetime, it wasn’t that long ago when cellular communication was about semi-emergency calls from the “car phone,” the user cost was over a dollar per minute and the connection data rate per user was in the tens of kbps. Personally, I recall when cell phone users prefaced the call with “I am on my cell”, to set the stage for a short conversation, and when the “exciting” new feature was the text message!
There is quite a difference between the “then” and “now” equipment at the base of the wireless antenna tower as well. When fully equipped this nearly ten year old wireless base station chassis in the photo below supported GSM wireless macro networks serving approximately .25 mbps to users in the wireless cell. The inside of the unit included module slots for the separate host processor, modem, and baseband processor and radio front end modules. The baseband processing boards included TI’s C6416 DSPs. The unit required hundreds of watts of input power, and clearly a two person lift as it was installed in an air-conditioned building at the foot of the tower.
Fast forward to today and in the second photo below is an evaluation board with our TCI6636 device targeted for 3G and 4G technologies, which is currently being used by our customers. The TCI6636 can be used in multiples to outfit a macro base station as well as in a single base station on a chip device for a higher performance small cell platform. Compared to the GSM basestation, the TCI6636 can support LTE and LTE-A data rates to the user over 100Mpbs, and resides on a single AMC form factor board (includes the host processing, baseband, modem and even some of the radio front end functionality) in under 70 watts.
Through technology advances and smart system level integration, the performance per watt and per physical footprint of a base station has increased dramatically over the last decade, helping to transform our wireless experience to the instantaneous voice, video and data connection we engage with every day.
We really have come a long way in a relatively short amount of time! Do you have any interesting stories about wireless technology that you want to share?
Don’t forget to check out another recent post on wireless base stations on the Multicore Mix Blog – www.ti.com/multicoremix, and an Ask the Expert video on small cells.
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Debbie Greenstreet is responsible for strategic marketing for the communications infrastructure and DSP-based processor products in Texas Instruments.