There’s a bandwidth explosion taking place in mobile communications. Under the broad umbrella of the ITU’s IMT-2000 set of 3G cellular communications standards, cellular data rates have risen from a few tens of kilobits to megabits per second, to tens of megabits per second, and now to hundreds of megabits per second with even higher levels of performance expected for fixed-location applications.


The concept of a 4G baseband sits at the leading edge of this cellular bit-rate evolution. Strictly speaking, 4G cellular communication will deliver performance levels above a Gbit/sec for fixed locations and sustained performance above 100 Mbits/sec for mobile applications. These expected data rates commonly include both advanced WiMAX and LTE or “long-term evolution” applications. Some might call these pre-4G or 3.9G standards, but as these standards push up into the hundreds of Mbits/sec, especially in the downlink direction, these early high-bandwidth standards are often considered 4G technologies.



Half the work when designing a 4G baseband SOC is straightforward. There are pitfalls, to be sure, but with the right tools, cores, algorithm integration, architecture, and implementation, it’s a very solvable problem.