Thanks to the acquisition of Infineon's communication business, Intel Corp. is now officially one of the leading providers of basedband processors in the industry. On Monday the company introduce its first compact solution that supports 2G, 3G and LTE (long-term evolution) networks and will be able to power next-gen handsets.

The X-Gold 706 baseband processor, manufactured in 40nm process technology, is based on the proven 2G/3G X-Gold 626 with an integrated low power LTE L1 subsystem. Therefore smart phones and tablets based on the XMM 6260 2G/3G platform using the X-Gold 626 can be easily migrated to LTE ensuring the customers a high degree of reuse of their hardware and software investment. The new baseband processor is accompanied with the Smarti 4G, incorporating optimized building blocks of the leading-edge 2G/3G Smarti UE2 and Smarti LU RF transceiver - the world’s first commercially available LTE transceiver. The 65nm CMOS RF transceiver employs a proven digital architecture that significantly reduces the number of external RF components such as power amplifiers and filters, and, hence, reduces board space, BOM and power consumption. 

The XMM 7060 slim modem platform fits in less than 700mm² PCB area including all necessary system components for quad band LTE, penta band 3G and quad band EDGE applications. It supports LTE category 3 (CAT-3) throughputs (100Mb/s/50Mb/s download/upload respectively) and is compliant to LTE Release 8 standard supporting FDD and TDD mode for all bandwidth up to 20MHz. In addition Inter-RAT handover features with 3G and 2G systems are naturally included.

The new space saving platform is suitable for integration in LTE-enabled portable devices such as mobile handsets, data cards/dongles and other embedded solutions.

 First samples of the platform will be available by the third quarter of 2011, with volume shipment scheduled for the second half of 2012

LTE is a fast growing market driven by the increasing demand for such mobile broadband services as multimedia broadcasting, music and video streaming and high-speed mobile Internet. It is expected to become the worldwide mobile standard for high-speed Internet due to its high data throughput and high spectral efficiency. However, LTE is faced with the challenge of a strongly fragmented regional frequency landscape. This calls for major RF innovation to create a low-power modem platform that can cover all the diverse frequency plans fitting to portable devices. Intel Mobile Communications is leveraging its proven leadership in RF and meets this challenge by offering the XMM 7060 platform.

Tags: Intel, 3G, 4G, LTE, Infineon