February 3, 2010 -- Zarlink Semiconductor today introduced a reference design with Freescale Semiconductor that simplifies and speeds the development of new equipment for wireless service providers evolving their networks to support bandwidth-intense smartphone applications.

Wireless networks face tremendous capacity pressure as consumers increasingly use smartphones to send and watch video, browse the web, and connect over social media. Most notably, traditional backhaul methods that rely on low data rate leased lines to move traffic from cellular base stations to the network backbone are both expensive to operate and overwhelmed by new bandwidth-hungry communication services.

Today, operators are aggressively migrating to higher bandwidth, lower cost packet infrastructures to backhaul traffic across their networks. Where traditional networks are architected to provide synchronization, packet networks must incorporate next-generation timing techniques, such as Zarlink's IEEE 1588 Timing over Packet (ToP) products, to ensure network synchronization. Zarlink's ToP products are being used by major equipment suppliers who represent more than 50 percent of the Ethernet wireless backhaul market.

The ZLE30320 reference design integrates the high performance clock recovery algorithm of Zarlink's ToP products with the versatile Freescale MPC8313 PowerQUICC processor.

The reference design is available to Zarlink qualified customers

Go to the Zarlink Semiconductor, Inc. website for product details.