ASOCS and ARM Announce Cloud RAN Reference Design at ARM TechCon

ARM TechCon - Santa Clara, CA, and Rosh Haayin, Israel – October 28, 2013 – ASOCS Ltd, a silicon IP provider of software-defined radio (SDR) solutions, and ARM®, the world’s leading semiconductor IP supplier (LSE: ARM; NASDAQ: ARMH), today announced a comprehensive reference design for next-generation mobile infrastructure equipment.  The design is based on ARM Cortex®-A57 processors - ARM’s highest performing processor, designed for mobile and enterprise computing applications - and ASOCS’s Modem Processing Unit (MPU), a real-time, reconfigurable platform that allows for the implementation of a wide variety of communication standards.

As a result of this joint reference design, communication chip makers are now able to develop custom chips for all types of base stations, from small cells up to Cloud Radio Access Networks (Cloud RANs), on ARM processors coupled with ASOCS’ MPUs.

The solution will offer a commercially viable topology for Cloud RAN, significantly decreasing cost and power compared to existing approaches and solutions.

“Cloud RAN provides significant capital and operational savings for operators by virtualizing baseband processing onto data centers, yet  general-purpose microprocessors are impractical for handling the very high data rates required of 4G systems and beyond,”  said Gilad Garon, CEO, ASOCS. “Solutions based on the ARM/ASOCS reference design will provide silicon designers a highly cost competitive solution while strictly maintaining the full physical layer resources virtualization, while offering the programmability and upgradability of large scale Cloud RAN systems.”  

“Service providers want to deploy robust Cloud RAN solutions without spending time tackling concerns about underlying hardware and services,” said Ian Ferguson, vice president, Segment Marketing, ARM. "The combination of the ARM Cortex-A57 processor with ASOCS’s modem processor units delivers a high-performance and cost-effective Cloud RAN solution, which will significantly improve the power-efficiency of Cloud RAN networking equipment.”

ASOCS’ Chief Architect, Barak Ullman, will present a paper entitled, “The ARM Cloud RAN Architecture” at ARM TechCon 2013, which runs from October 29 – 31, 2013, in the Santa Clara Convention Center.

About ASOCS

ASOCS develops and licenses software-defined modems for mobile, wireless and broadband communications based on its heterogeneous Modem Processing Unit (MPU) and silicon IP, ModemX®, designed to meet current and future modem requirements. ASOCS enables the highest possible capacity baseband unit for the Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) as well as other wireless infrastructure cells, from small to macro and beyond. ASOCS’ Modem Programming Language (MPL) is the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform programming of the physical layers for a wide variety of communication standards. ASOCS’ MPL enables fast, easy development of physical layer solutions, greatly improving total cost of ownership (TCO) using standard C-language programming and function libraries. For more information, visit www.asocstech.com.