Nujira’s ET chips can significantly reduce the energy consumption of small cells and access points for consumer, enterprise and metro applications.
Whether it’s 802.11ac WiFi, LTE, or LTE-Advanced, our high bandwidth ET solutions can bring significant benefits to the fast-growing small cell market.
Benefits of ET for small cells
Reduced energy consumption- Reduced heat dissipation
- Increased RF output power
- Reduced PA cost
- Enables broadband single-SKU platforms
- Simplifies or eliminates the need for DPD
Reduced energy consumption
As well as boosting green credentials, and reducing opex costs, cutting current consumption can also have a positive impact at the product level, enabling smaller, lighter products that do more.
By integrating Envelope Tracking, your 4G small cells can consume less energy than their 3G predecessors.
With Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) setting hard limits on available supply current, ET enables you to deliver more functionality, higher RF power and faster data rates from the same energy supply, giving your products a competitive advantage.
Improved RF performance from smaller, cheaper PAs
With today’s high data rates demanding high peak-to-average waveforms, Nujira’s ET chips boost the peak supply voltage to the PA above the supply rail, delivering high peak power only when it’s needed.
The boosted peak voltage allows a smaller, cheaper PA to be used to deliver higher average output powers, saving cost and boosting efficiency – a true “win-win” for the OEM.
Less heat = less cost
With passive cooling now the norm in small cells, reducing the heat dissipation in the PA has a significant impact on the thermal and mechanical design of the product.
This saves cost, size and weight, and enables smaller form factor products to pack in more functionality.
The dramatic reduction in heat dissipation also significantly improves reliability – not just at the PA itself, but for all the other components in the system.
Whether you’re trying to squeeze 4G into a 3G enclosure, eliminate fans and heatsinks, or design a low-impact, lightweight form factor for small cells or distributed antennas, our ET chips help you squeeze more functionality into less space, and at lower cost.
Enables broadband, single-SKU platforms with global coverage
Nujira’s wide swing-range ET chips overcome the efficiency penalty associated with broadband RFPAs, enabling a single, high-efficiency ET front-end to cover all frequency bands from 450 MHz to 3.8 GHz – using less energy than today’s optimised single-band designs.
This allows small cell manufacturers to design and validate a single broadband platform, which can be configured to address any WiFi or LTE frequency band simply by fitting appropriate filters.
This reduces development cost, speeds time to market, and eases the inventory management headache of supporting multiple LTE frequency band combinations.
Simplifies or eliminates the need for DPD
The Digital Pre-Distortion used in high power macrocells can’t easily be scaled down to small cell power levels.
The signal processing requirements of DPD don’t scale with RF power level, and the cost and power consumption overhead of a high power DPD solution is unsustainable in small cell applications.
Nujira’s patented IsoGain® ET shaping table approach, combined with our high bandwidth, high swing range ETICs allows the linearization of the PA can be dramatically simplified, or eliminated altogether.
By operating the PA in ET mode, variations over temperature and mismatch are significantly reduced, allowing open-loop DPD to be used in the majority of applications. For a technical presentation, follow this link.
This simplifies the product development cycle, speeds time-to-market, and reduces cost and power consumption in the baseband.