At the crossroads of four wireless industry trends is where Cupertino, Calif.-based Morphics Technology Inc. believes it has found an opportunity.
The four factors are expensive spectrum, expensive infrastructure, the migration of predominantly voice traffic to data traffic and fractured standards. The solution, says John Ralston, vice president of marketing and licensing at Morphics, is the type of flexibility provided by software-defined radios.
“Spectrum is pricey and infrastructure is pricey. And as soon as you start rolling data onto networks, you use a lot of both,” said Ralston. The challenge, he said, is how to most efficiently use spectrum and infrastructure.
“It’s bad enough that the equipment platforms are going to be expensive, but now you have to have multiple design teams designing products for each of the (third-generation) standards,” being debated, he said.
Reconfigurability allows manufacturers to design a smaller number of platforms that can handle different standards, different data rates and different air interfaces, said Ralston.
A key Morphics technology is DRL, or Dynamically Reconfigurable Logic, which Ralston said allows the best aspects of hardware reconfigurability and software reprogrammability to be combined in Application-Specific Adaptive Processors, or ASAPs.
The type of architectures that these ASAPs fit into include wireless systems on a chip that typically would include memory, a microprocessor, a digital signal processor and the Morphics
ASAP. The control functions would run on the microprocessor, and the speech-related processing would run on the DSP. The Morphics ASAP would handle most of the intensive signal processing, including functions related to the individual air interfaces, which today are handled on application specific integrated circuits.
The ASAP acronym, the company said, drives home the time-to-market benefits its technology can provide.
“It offloads a lot of the really challenging signal-processing tasks and lets handset manufacturers and base station manufacturers build flexible products,” said Ralston.
The company expects to provide fully functional prototypes within the next 18 months. The company will initially target the base station market with two offerings-a world Time Division Multiple Access base station ASAP and a world wideband-Code Division Multiple Access ASAP product.
SDR (software-defined radios) normally is thought of as a technology that allows for seamless roaming; however, Ralston said that capability is way down on the list of reasons to use SDR. Of more importance, he said, is the ability to customize value-added services for particular customers, reduce the number of product platforms that must be developed and supported and speed time to market because carriers don’t have to wait for standards to crystallize and services to be defined before starting to build out.
SDR is not a new concept, but only during the last three to four years has it received serious attention from commercial wireless carriers and manufacturers. Ralston said there have been limited initial deployments in base stations, primarily because of the cost savings it can provide. He said manufacturers can save hundreds of dollars in component costs and thousands of dollars per base station because of the smaller number of platforms that must be developed. But the biggest savings, said Ralston, are realized by network operators, which can save tens of thousands of dollars in upgrades and maintenance through automated over-the-network reconfigurability.
Ralston said beginning next year, the use of software radios in base stations will increase to enable mixed voice and data applications for 2.5 generation and 3G wireless services, and within five years, the industry expects widespread adoption by most manufacturers of SDR as a core platform, particularly for 3G.
On the handset side, research and development efforts revolving around SDR in North America, Europe and Asia have cropped up with all major manufacturers participating in some form, said Ralston. Initial commercial introduction of handsets is expected within the next two years, and increased usage is expected with 3G in 2003. By 2005, Ralston said the industry expects widespread adoption of handsets and a movement to SDR as the baseline design platform.
In the long run, SDR will allow manufacturers to produce less-expensive phones because they will need to build fewer platforms, creating the economies of scale needed to continue driving down prices.
In addition to developing its technology, Morphics also has involved itself in dealing with many of the regulatory and standards hurdles the industry will face in order to achieve widespread deployment.
“We’re emerging as a technology leader, but in order for SDR to really take off, there are also a lot of industrywide issues that have to be addressed, and we’re kind of proud of the fact that we’ve stepped up to the plate and are helping the industry understand and tackle some of the issues,” said Ralston, who also is on the steering committee of the SDR Forum and has been involved in creating alliances between the SDR Forum and other wireless industry standards group, such as the Wireless Applications Protocol Forum.
Ralston is encouraging collaboration between the SDR Forum and the Federal Communications Commission to assess and promote the use of SDR technologies for improving the efficiencies with which wireless spectrum can be used.
“Enhanced spectral efficiencies and reconfigurability are critical in enabling the economically viable rollout of many proposed new wireless data products and services,” he said.
