Capacity-Increasing Chip For 3G CDMA2000 Base Station

Lucent Technologies today introduced a capacity-increasing chip that will be integrated into its new flagship third-generation (3G) CDMA2000™ base station unveiled last week, the Flexent® Modular Cell 4.0, and future products in the Flexent® OneBTS™ family of base stations. The "ASIC," or application-specific integrated circuit, was developed by the mobility team in Lucent's Bell Laboratories and incorporates intelligent antenna capabilities that enable these base stations to support substantially greater volumes of voice and data traffic.

Mobile operators that deploy 3G CDMA2000 1X networks already can double voice capacity over existing 2G CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) networks. Lucent's ASIC, which supports CDMA2000, also can deliver an additional two-fold increase in capacity by utilizing the intelligent antenna feature. It also can boost data capacity by more than 100 percent to accommodate the growing demand for mobile high-speed data services, and this can increase overall data throughput delivered directly to consumers.

"The development of this ASIC is another example of how we are leveraging our spread-spectrum CDMA expertise to provide our customers with the most advanced and cost-effective solutions," said Paul Mankiewich, CTO and chief architect of Lucent's Mobility Solutions Group. "Mobile operators that invest in the Modular Cell 4.0 and our future CDMA2000 base stations will be able to manage the ever-increasing need for voice capacity, and growing demand for mobile data services among businesses and consumers, for years to come."

The Modular Cell 4.0 is "pre-wired" to support intelligent antenna capabilities, which provides mobile operators with a simple and cost-effective way to add capacity.

The mobility team overcame significant challenges to develop an integrated solution that provides true per-user intelligent antenna processing. Without per-user intelligent antenna processing, a base station's antennas produce a wide-angle radio signal beam that transmits to all users in a given area. However, with per-user intelligent antenna processing, the base station sends a separate, dedicated, narrower beam to each active user, which adaptively follows them as they move through the base station's coverage area.

Transmitting simultaneous, dedicated beams to each active user makes more efficient use of spectrum and reduces interference, resulting in capacity gains.

Lucent's intelligent antenna processing techniques also are applied to the "reverse link," or the signal a base station receives from a mobile device when a voice or data call is active. The combination of intelligent antenna processing at the base station -- in both the signal transmission and reception of signals from mobile devices -- makes the overall system capacity gains possible.

Capacity and performance improvements from the Lucent intelligent antenna ASIC can be realized whether a mobile operator's customer base consists of 2G CDMA or 3G CDMA2000 users, or a mix of both, without the need for modifications to today's 2G CDMA or 3G CDMA2000 cell phones or devices.

The high-density ASIC, which includes the intelligent antenna feature, will be integrated into Lucent channel cards, which can be used to further enhance the capacity of the Modular Cell 4.0, and future CDMA2000 base stations in the OneBTS family.

The Modular Cell 4.0 is part of Lucent's Flexent® OneBTS™ family of base stations, built using a one-of-a-kind digital platform for 3G technologies. The product is the highest-capacity base station ever introduced by Lucent, and nearly all of its hardware is common to Lucent's 3G UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) base stations.

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