Wintegra Launches New Family of Wireless Processors for GSM, HSPA+ and LTE Base Stations

WinPath3 family provides fully programmable SoC platform that scales from femtocells to multi-sector LTE eNodeB

Austin, TX and Barcelona, Spain, February 16, 2009.  Wintegra announced today at Mobile World Congress a new generation of WinPath processors and software designed specifically for the needs of 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile and fixed wireless base stations.   The processors, part of the new WinPath3 family, were designed to address the migration of wireless networks to all IP traffic, and can be deployed as an overlay to existing networks or as part of highly optimized next generation base station architectures.

The WinPath3 "W" series processors are optimized to handle on a single device the real-time IP packet processing demands of both the radio baseband and network interface protocols, allowing system designers to significantly reduce cost and power consumption.  Wintegra's unique heterogeneous multi-core design, with up to twelve multi-threaded data path cores, an integrated 20 Gigabit/second hardware packet classifier, and dual multi-threaded MIPS 34K CPU cores, can reduce power consumption for data path protocol processing by up to 70% over conventional multi-core processing solutions. 

Such protocols, including the complex LTE Media Access Control (MAC) layer, Packet Data Convergence Protocol (PDCP), Robust Header Compression (RoHC) GTP tunneling, Ethernet OAM, and security and encryption standards such as Snow3G, Kasumi, SHA, AES and IPSec, are extremely time-sensitive yet must be able to scale to the much higher data bandwidths associated with HSPA+ and LTE networks.

With five times the peak performance of the current WinPath processors, the WinPath3 "W" series are the first in the industry to provide hardware acceleration and software support for all GSM, HSPA+, WiMAX and LTE data path protocols, while also providing integrated support for legacy interfaces such as TDM and UTOPIA.   The new processors also provide up to 16 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, 72 Fast Ethernet interfaces, PCI Express, and multiple lanes of Serial RapidIO (SRIO) for baseband connectivity.   This flexibility, combined with Wintegra's wide-range of royalty-free production software, means that equipment manufacturers can quickly develop a range of software-compatible solutions targeting femtocells, picocells and macro base stations while also supporting legacy software for existing 2G and 3G networks.

"Network operators and equipment manufacturers are under tremendous pressure to introduce enhanced wireless data services while minimizing capital and operating expenses," said Caroline Gabriel, owner and editor of Rethink Research.  "The flexibility and efficiency of Wintegra's approach aligns very well with the emerging needs of the HSPA+ and LTE community." 

Wintegra has also developed a broad and deep ecosystem of partners that share Wintegra's vision of providing integrated hardware and software reference platforms to accelerate product development cycles.  In addition to Wintegra and picoChip's existing and highly successful WiMAX and LTE reference platform, Wintegra and Xilinx have announced a new Targeted Design Platform for LTE that utilizes Wintegra's processors and software, and Wintegra and NetLogic Microsystems have announced a new reference platform for Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) that will bring unprecedented DPI capability to base stations and cell site aggregation equipment.

"Our success in 3G and WiMAX markets with our current WinPath processors and software has given us an insider's view of the evolution towards LTE," according to Eran Kirzner, VP of Engineering for Wireless Systems at Wintegra.   "We have leveraged this experience to optimize the WinPath3 silicon and software for the migration to all-IP wireless broadband networks."

The WinPath3 processors will be available in Q3 of this year, with LTE and HSPA+ software already available today on the existing WinPath2 processors.

About Wintegra

Wintegra is a leading provider of access processing semiconductors enabling the delivery of new services for the evolving communications network infrastructure. Wintegra-based solutions are used in a wide range of networking and communication platforms such as wireline and wireless infrastructure, and access routers and are used by many of the leading equipment manufacturers worldwide.   www.wintegra.com