Ericsson offers 4G ASICs

ALTHOUGH ITS mobile phone manufacturing operation is merged with Sony, that hasn't stopped Ericsson from developing the basis for the world's first LTE mobile phone platform - the M700.

LTE, or Long Term Evolution, is generally recognised as a world standard for 4G networks. In terms of speed, the M700 supports a top download data rate of 100 Mbit/s and a top upload rate of 50 Mbit/s.

And, yes that's considerably faster than most people's DSL fixed line broadband link which struggles to provide 2 Mbit/s. Of course, LTE's top speeds are theoretical.

We all know what happened with claims for the original 3G, which provided about a quarter of the promised top speed.

Ericsson says samples of its M700 ASICs will become available this year (2008), while commercial release is set for 2009.

The M7000 will support bandwidths of between 1.4 and 20MHz, but the really important bit is that it can work with up to six bands, including 700 MHz.

Hmm. Didn't a large country in the Americas just auction off a large chunk of 700 MHz spectrum?

Ericsson actually predicts that the first M700 based products won't be available until 2010. The first such products based on will probably be dedicated data devices like laptop modems, ExpressCards and USB modems.

However, the manufacturer does claim to offer a rich set of interfaces to enable integration with handset platforms to create multi-mode devices.

In other words, the M700 will do the data bit while another ASIC could handle the voice bit.

That said, Ericsson did showcase the first LTE end-to-end phone call involving handheld devices at the recent MWC show in Barcelona.

This is encouraging stuff because 3G networks were held back by the lack of decent working 3G phones to allow for proper testing of the network infrastructure.

At this rate, Japan's NTT Docomo stands a good chance of getting a commercial LTE/4g based network – which it calls Super 3G – going by 2010. µ

See Also
Docomo tests 4G in Japan