Digital Enhancement Limited today announces the commercial launch of the Intel 
FPGA-based Digital Front-End (DFE) IP solution, which provides high-performance 
and high efficiency 5G radio solution across scalable multiple Intel FPGA 
families.

With the continuous evolution of 5G & WiFi, RAN communication solutions such as 
Remote Radio Units (RRU), repeaters and routers have increased requirements on 
radio performance and system level power efficiency. From Massive-MIMO 
Macrocell to Small Cell, the DFE technologies including DPD (Digital 
Pre-Distortion) and CFR (Crest Factor Reduction) have been well recognized as 
the key enabling and differentiating elements to satisfying demanding use cases 
crossing different frequency bands, bandwidths, under different PA types and 
output power combinations.

"Digital Enhancement is a start-up company focusing on building the world's 
leading agile DFE technology, breaking the limitations of traditional DFE 
solutions that are bandwidth constrained, require tight coupling of hardware 
and with limited choices of power amplifiers. We are very pleased to have 
in-depth collaboration with Intel in the past year to provide a joint 
commercial DFE solution over FPGA for 5G base station mass production. This not 
only fully validates the fast and lightweight implementation of Digital 
Enhancement's DFE solution, but also its high-performance linearization and 
cost effectiveness. Customer can also easily evaluate the overall RF system 
performance based on different DPD models and PAs with our developed DETP, a 
powerful testing platform with 3GPP signal generator, DFE and analysis 
functions built-in," said Ziming Wang, Founder and CEO of Digital Enhancement. 

The DFE IP "Hummingbird" series supports 3G/4G/5G communications, covering all 
types of PA techniques, and can effectively reduce the Long-term Memory Effect 
on GaN amplifiers. With Hummingbird IP, only minimum FPGA resource at a 
relative low sampling rate is required to deliver the necessary performance to 
linearize high power amplifiers for base station equipment under the use case 
of 4T4R and 200MHz signal bandwidth. While delivering a high linear 
performance, such as one that's better than -50dBc ACLR and less than 2.5% EVM 
on a PA of more than 40% efficiency, the overall cost of the digital and RF 
systems in RRUs can be also significantly reduced.

"PA non-linearity issue has been the most challenging problem in RU design for 
more than three decades. With the need of RU to now support higher bandwidth 
(e.g. in excess of 200MHz) in multi-band configurations at lower thermal 
budget, it's critical to employ best-in-class DPD technology on a flexible and 
scalable hardware portfolio as the solution to address; a wide variety of 
different radio use cases. Intel's FPGA family, including Agilex, Stratix, and 
Arria, have been designed for the efficient and flexible DFE implementations, 
particularly with the industry's best performance per watt Intel Agilex FPGA 
family. The combination of DPD technology from our partner Digital Enhancement 
running on Intel FPGAs would offer one of the best choices to our customers for 
radio design," said Mike Fitton, General Manager, Network Business Division of 
Intel's Programable Solution Group.   

Next, Digital Enhancement will continue to scale up its collaboration with 5G 
base stations and O-RAN vendors worldwide, and to expand the application of 
miniaturized DFE in the WiFi and mobile device markets.

About Digital Enhancement

Established in 2019, Digital Enhancement is committed to provide the world's 
leading agile DFE solutions, including DPD and CFR. To learn more, please visit 
www.digienh.com.

Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel 
Corporation or its subsidiaries.

SOURCE: Digital Enhancement Limited

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