An Approach for Designing a UMTS and CDMA2000 Dual Standard Compatible Baseband ASIC

The Third Generation (3G) cellular mobile communication systems aim at providing higher data rates, improved quality of service, support for multimedia applications and global roaming. Cdma2000 and Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) have emerged as two leading 3G standards in USA and European countries, respectively. Both the standards are capable of delivering high bandwidth data, voice and multimedia services to users of mobile equipment, but are not directly interoperableand are not available across different geographic areas, due to which global roaming is not possible in true sense of using single mobile equipment. However, both UMTS and cdma2000 are based on wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) as the access method. Due to this, there exist some inherent commonalities between them. In this paper we will try to exploit the commonalities between the two standards in order to design an ASIC, which can provide dual standard capability. This paper discusses the physical layer aspects of the two standards and proposes an approach to design an ASIC which can be mapped to baseband processing part of the physical layer and is capable of delivering for either of the two aforementioned standards.