Maxim Integrated Products has announced it latest small cell RF transceiver which supports all 3G and 4G LTE frequency bands.
The company believes small cell basestations will play a strategic part in the rollout of 4G services both outdoors as well as in-building.
“With LTE we are seeing operators taking a different approach from 3G, both large and small basestations will be deployed in the network outdoors as well as in doors from the start,” said Vickram Vathulya, managing director of RF products at Maxim Integrated.
This will see the deployment of so-called heterogeneous networks (HetNets).
40 LTE frequency bands
The company believes that small cell designers will need RF transceivers which support all the 40 LTE frequency bands.
It supports LTE FDD-LTE and TD-LTE modes as well as 3G WCDMA mode.
Maxim will also offer system-level reference designs for indoor and outdoor basestation applications.
2x2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
The MAX2580 transceiver integrates a 2x2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) RF front-end, including IF amplifiers, fractional-N frequency synthesisers, data converters and channel selection filters.
It outputs a data stream to the baseband processors over a JESD207 data interface.
The power amplifier (PA) pre-driver delivers 0dBm output power level.
The MAX2580 is sampling to qualified customers and will be available in the second half of 2013.
The MAX2580 will be on display at Maxim’s stand at Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona, Spain on February 25-28.
