Eyal Bergman, Director of Product Marketing at Ceva comments at ElectronicsWeekly.com: The changing standards increase risk with a traditional, hardware-based design approach. IC designers using such an approach can either find themselves betting on the wrong standard and end up with an obsolete product before even being launched, or getting into costly investment by developing dedicated chips for each of the two standards, with no guarantee of a return on investment.
To ensure that both standards are supported in 4G modems, a flexible approach is preferred, and this means a programmable engine capable of delivering the required performance.
A software-based approach that offers multimode systems support and can replace multiple dedicated baseband systems seems to be the right direction. In addition, this rapid evolution requires a more efficient development process. Reusing the same platform over multiple product generations is essential.
