QUALCOMM Releases MSM, Cell Site Modem, IF Chip Set

At a press conference at the Wireless 98 tradeshow, QUALCOMM's ASIC group has unveiled three products geared toward CDMA applications.

The MSM3000 mobile station modem (MSM) baseband processing solution is designed for handset applications. This IC offers data rates of better than 64 kb/s. In addition, it integrates CDMA building blocks, an ARM microcontroller unit, and DSP cores onto a single chip.

The MSM3000 features a SuperFinger demodulation architecture. With this architecture, the MSM can simultaneous demodulate six to eight channels in order to create a maximum speed of 86.4 kb/s. The chip is also asymmetrically optimized for typical client-server, e-mail, and web-browsing applications with speeds up to 14.4 kb/s on the reverse link.

The MSM supports 8 and 13 kb QCELP and EVRC vocoders. It has a pinout similar to previous QUALCOMM MSM generations and is backward compatible with existing radio designs.

QUALCOMM has also released the CSM000 cell site modem (CSM) and the IFR3000 and IFT3000 IF chip set.

The CSM2000 targets CDMA base stations and test equipment. This multiple-channel CDMA digital baseband modem is capable of supporting up to eight forward link channels and eight reverse link channels. Each of the eight channels can perform CDMA modulation, demodulation, and Viterbi decoding. In addition, each channel within the modem can be accessed as if they were a single CSM.

QUALCOMM's IFR3000 and IFT3000 IF chip set performs all signal processing functions between the digital baseband and the RF front end. The new IF converters are geared toward multi-mode cellular, PCS, and wireless local loop (WLL) applications. They directly interface with QUALCOMM's MSM2300 and MSM3000 digital chips.

Engineering samples for all of the new products are expected in the third quarter of 1998. Production for all of the devices is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 1998.