CEVA Power 5G DSP with Artificial Intelligence

24 February, 2018

PentaG platform includes 5G AI Processor: a fully programmable processor that uses machine learning to enable advanced beamforming techniques and link adaptation scenarios

CEVA DSP

CEVA, Inc. from Herzliya, Israel, is making a major move this year in MWC, by introducing PentaG™, a comprehensive 5G intellectual property (IP) platform for enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB). Compliant to the 3GPP 5G New Radio (NR) Release-15 and software upgradable for Release-16, PentaG is targeted at smartphones, fixed wireless access and other embedded devices that need multi-gigabit data rates to enable use cases such as 4K video streaming, augmented reality, virtual reality, autonomous driving and home broadband.

PentaG will be available for licensing to select customers in the second quarter of 2018 and for general licensing in the third quarter of 2018. It is built on CEVA’s experience in developing DSP platforms for 2G, 3G and 4G LTE modem designs. To date, more than 8 billion handsets have shipped worldwide powered by CEVA DSPs. PentaG includes a combination of scalar and vector DSP processors with an enhanced 5G instruction set architecture (ISA), specialized co-processors, accelerators and software in a modular architecture.

“5G standard poses immense challenge”

It also includes an AI processor that takes advantage of machine learning techniques to improve link adaptation workloads. The company says that PentaG achieves up to 50% power savings for commonly used workloads, all within the low latency constraints and extreme throughput requirements of 5G NR. Michael Boukaya, general manager of the wireless business unit at CEVA, said that the 5G standard poses immense challenges for semiconductor designers.

“We designed PentaG to overcome the limitations of conventional DSP-based LTE/LTE-Advanced architectures, which simply do not scale to support 5G.”  The platform is complemented with a complete hardware and software development environment, including FPGA-based development board, allowing to immediately begin 5G software implementation and accelerate modem development.

CEVA's IP Platform PentaG Block DIagram
CEVA’s IP Platform PentaG Block DIagram

PentaG supports the full gamut of 5G eMBB use cases, including standalone (SA) and non-standalone (NSA), mmWave and sub-6 GHz. The platform sustains an impressive bit-rate of up to 10Gbps and offers a scalable architecture to support most advanced wireless technologies like Massive-MIMO, beamforming and complex link adaptation schemes. The major IP blocks are: Enhanced CEVA-XC4500 DSP with 5G ISA Extensions, Vector MAC Unit, Cluster of CEVA-X2 DSPs, Polar and LDPC Encoder and Decoder accelerators.

Unique Neural Network Processor

 But the most interesting block is its 5G AI Processor: a fully programmable processor that uses machine learning methods to enable advanced beamforming techniques and link adaptation scenarios as defined in 5G-NR Release15. It uses a neural networks rather than a traditional database search approach. The 5G AI processor increases downlink data throughput by 20% and ensures unmatched performance under the most advanced maximum likelihood decoding (MLD) equalization schemes.

Keysight Step-in

During Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona, Spain, Keysight Technologies and CEVA will demonstarte CEVA’s PentaG 5G New Radio (NR) IP platform for enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and Keysight’s Signal Studio to generate 5G NR downlink signals with varying MIMO channel impairments. The demonstration will take place at CEVA’s booth, Hall 7 stand F60.
More information: www.ceva-dsp.com/product/ceva-pentag
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Posted in: AI , News , Semiconductors , Wireless