How to Design an LTE Modem

By SemiWiki

September 17, 2013

Designing an LTE modem is an interesting case study in architectural and system level design because it is pretty much on the limit of what is possible in a current process node such as 28nm. I talked to Johannes Stahl of Synopsys about how you would accomplish this with the Synopsys suite of system level tools. He is the first to admit that this is not a push-button flow where everything flows cleanly from one tool to the next, but more of a portfolio of technologies that can be used to get a modem done. Another complication over previous generations is that multiple radios can be used simultaneously.

LTE is actually a whole series of different standards with different uplink and downlink data rates, but one thing is constant: no matter what the data rate, the power dissipation of the modem must be such that the battery of the phone will last all day. So efficient tradeoff analysis is required to meet power and performance goals.

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