"The MegaBEE platform delivers all the required elements for 5G massive MIMO prototyping in one box, greatly simplifying the task of building a system and freeing designers up to focus on algorithms instead of the interfaces around the periphery of their design," said Chen Chang, BEEcube founder and CEO.

"Our tier one customers have pushed us hard to create an easy-to-use yet powerful MIMO prototyping platform and together with Xilinx, we've done just that."

The MegaBEE platform's unique clocking structure allows antenna modules to be dispersed over a three mile radius while maintaining phase coherence, enabling the system to be used for distributed MIMO as well as massive MIMO systems with greater coverage and capacity. Included in the MegaBEE platform are RF chains, filters, power amps, 4000 parallel DSP slices, processor cores, multiple channels of 10GE interconnect, and on-board DDR3 memory for storing real-time 5G test vectors.

In addition, Xilinx's Zynq All Programmable SoCs enable the massive compute bandwidth demanded by massive MIMO algorithms with an architecture featuring high-speed logic fabric, DSP blocks, Block RAM capable of running 491MHz+, and SERDES able to run at up to 12.5Gbps. The Zynq SoC's dual-core ARM Cortex A9 MPCores enable a Linux cluster architecture unique in the 5G prototyping space. MegaBEE also fully integrates with the Xilinx Vivado tool suite to significantly reduce development time for early 5G systems, while providing a library of IP to implement all inter-chip communication.

"Xilinx devices have long been used in wireless infrastructure equipment due to their unique properties of being fully programmable and high performance. MegaBEE's Linux cluster for distributed control is one of the most innovative uses of Zynq's dual ARM cores that I have seen," said Ivo Bolsens, Xilinx CTO and senior vice president.