Keith Nethercott Electronic Solutions Ltd.

12 YEARS EXPERIENCE WITH LEADING TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES

 

With 12 years experience in the design and implementation of high performance digital products, KNES Ltd has been involved in the following projects;

 

 

NODE B REMOTE RADIO HEAD

 

This was a single RF board development targeted at WIMAX, UMTS standards and implemented using both TDD and FDD topologies. The digital control for the RF circuitry was provided by an embedded processor implemented in a Virtex 5 FPGA. The processor interfaced to 1Gbits of DDR2 SDRAM, 2 x I2C interfaces and a CPRI IP core which provided the backhaul communications. The radio control/data was provided by several SPI interfaces, 2 x dual DACs and a Quad ADC.

 

My role on this project was to implement the digital circuitry required to control the RF circuits, this involved component specification and collating the schematics for both digital and RF circuits. This particular design, only reached the schematic stage before being shelved. But the architecture was based on previous designs that have gone through the full design/manufacture cycle.     

 

 

NODE B DIGITAL PROCESSING UNIT

The Digital Processing Unit is a backplane design, which consists of five slots, 1 x control card, 3 x sector cards and a spare slot for future upgrades.

The control card provides GPS synchronisation, and Gigabit Ethernet backhaul communications. The board includes a GPS module, clock distribution circuitry, a Powerquicc 3 processor and a Tundra Serial Rapid IO device.

Each Sector card provides the baseband processing and interface to the radio section of the Basestation. A Sector card consists of a Powerquicc 3 processor, 4 off  Virtex 5 LX220 FPGAs, a proprietary Nextwave ASIC and a CPRI Interface.

Each of the cards connect on a backplane, the backplane is designed to carry 3 Gbps Serial RapidIO signals, clock distribution signals, I2C signals and Hot Swap signalling.

I had a supporting role on this project, which involved helping with the design of the Sector card, and supporting the overall manufacturing test strategy of the complete unit.    

 

 

NODE B PATCH BOARD

The Patch Board is a single board design that provides a number of backhaul communication options and supervisory features. The board provided lightning protection between the backhaul network and a digital baseband processing board.

The backhaul options are E1/T1, E3/T3 and Ethernet, the supervisory features include fan control, temperature monitoring, voltage monitoring, physical alarm interface and RS-232 debug ports. The design also included an interface to an LCD display and JTAG test interfaces.

 

I was responsible for all aspects of the pcb design/manufacture cycle for this board.

 

 

MILITARY COMMS HANDHELD PROTOTYPE

This was a multi-board solution, which would be used to develop a handheld device with cryptographic functions. The main board included an MPC850 processor with SDRAM and Flash, whilst the daughter board contained an XC4000 Xilinx FPGA, which would be used to emulate the cryptographic capabilities.

 

I was responsible for all aspects of the pcb design/manufacture cycle for these boards.