Arctic Semiconductor announced that its groundbreaking RF transceiver, IceWings™ is powering a new universal 5G small cell infrastructure platform from Compal Electronics. The world's first open ecosystem small cell platform leverages IceWings' design integrated with NXP® Semiconductors' Layerscape® Access LA12xx programmable baseband processor to achieve the highest performance at the lowest power consumption and beats 3GPP standard requirements, all at a competitive cost. The platform will be demonstrated at Mobile World Congress 2023 in Barcelona.

The new infrastructure platform can operate at any 5G FR1 frequency bands from 600MHz to 7.2GHz. A 4x4 MIMO solution, it is fully integrated with best-in-class components and supports throughputs beyond Gbps speeds. Customers across the globe can use the universal platform to produce cost-optimized, low-power 5G small cells and O-RAN Radio Units for a wide range of applications including all-in-one or distributed networks in public or private bands.

Compal selected Arctic's IceWings, an innovative RF transceiver with 4 integrated transmitters and receivers that supports a wide range of standards in signal frequencies below 7.2GHz. The new silicon is based on an advanced CMOS process node, providing superior performance with RF enhancements for both 5G Sub-7GHz and mmWave infrastructure. This integrated small cell system is based on NXP's Layerscape multicore Arm® SoC and is coupled with the new LA12xx software defined radio.

Together this solution supports high throughput transmission and reception as well as highly complex digital functions including Digital Pre-Distortion. The IceWings RFIC is highly integrated and delivers 4 transmit and 4 receive paths via a glue-less interface directly to NXP's LA12xx baseband processor.