Wireless bandwidth requirements continue to climb as mobile devices incorporate higher resolution screens and more powerful processors. This has placed more demands on access points to provide multiple multimedia streams, as well as more data bandwidth.
Freescale’s QorIQ LS1043A residential gateway reference design (Fig. 1) uses Quantenna Communications’ QSR10G 10G Wave 3 802.11ac Wi-Fi support to deliver 10G wireless communication. Quantenna’s product family supports up to 12 streams using True 8 × 8 adaptive technology and multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) technology. The reference design also has a 10 Gbit/s copper or fiber WAN connection.
The QorIQ LS1043A SoC is the heart of the platform (Fig. 2). The chip has four ARM Cortex-A53 cores linked by an ARM CoreLink CCI-400 cache coherent interconnect. Hardware security—including ARM Trust Zone support—plus hardware queue and buffer management allow the SoC to handle 10 Gbit/s connections. The chip includes PCI Express Gen 2.0 and SATA 3.0 support. The 32-bit memory controller can handle DDR3L and DDR4 memory.
The QSR10GU chip is based on Quantenna’s 10G Wave 3 platform. It supports Wi-Fi standards up to 802.11ac. The access point (AP) chipset is dual-band (5 GHz and 2.4 GHz) and can handle dual concurrent operation and management. It has adaptive MIMO support. The 5-GHz band can support 160-MHz channels. The 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz transmissions can employ 1,024-QAM modulation. For host support, the chip has PCIe Gen3/Gen2, RXAUI, and RGMII interfaces.
The QSR10GU is the top of the line at 10 Gbit/s throughput, with simultaneous 2.4- and 5-GHz operation. It supports up to 12 streams. The low end of the family handles eight streams, supports 5-GHz networks and has a throughout of 8.6 Gbit/s.