SC5 is a Software Defined Radio that supports a range of applications including GSM, UMTS and LTE base stations
Although the SC5 is cellXica’s first SDR platform it built on the experience of developing earlier FPGA based platforms at Airvana. Its design was heavily influenced by the availability of Xilinx’s Zynq®-7000 family and the Analog Devices AD9361 RFIC. By adding to these some memory, an RF front end, an OXCO, a GPS module and some digital interfaces the SC5 was created.
The SC5020 has an open front end and may be tuned across a range from 70MHz to 3.1GHz. This makes it very useful for development and laboratory use, but for real world base station applications filtering to suppress out of band interference is required. This has been implemented in two ways. For some products, such as the LXW5, adding filtering, duplexing and power amplification externally is most appropriate whereas in other cases a number of bands can be supported on a single PCB.
Several wideband and banded versions of the SC5 family have been developed, offering different frequency coverage, a range of output power options and even platforms with support for more antennas to support range finding. By keeping control of the architecture the same applications run on most of these platforms without change.
Some customers build our SC5 boards into their own products, and others use boards supplied in our own enclosures, such as the SC5100 and the LXW5.