Altera®, Texas Instruments®, and Hitek Systems Collaborate on Macro Cell Enablement Package

The highlight of this collaboration is a live demonstration, the result of successful hardware and software validation of component-level features and system-level solutions, providing confidence and quick time-to-prototype for designers of next-generation wireless radios. Altera’s FPGA-based OpenRAN Radio Enablement Packages are fully compliant with the JESD204C protocol and allow rapid integration with DAC and ADC RF ICs.

Wireless designers can quickly prototype their innovative next-generation macro/micro cell design, taking advantage of our partners' respective areas of expertise:

• Altera’s Agilex™ 7 FPGAs and SoCs with up to 2x better fabric performance per watt vs. competing 7nm FPGAs and complete hardware, software, and digital design wireless solutions.
• TI’s Analog Front End (AFE), featuring the 4-channel AFE7769D RF transceiver with integrated CFR/DPD and JESD204C compliant interface.
• Hitek’s proven FPGA design services and production board/SoM manufacturing offer a modular solution uniting both component vendors' products.

Key customer benefits include:

• A tested and validated single-link JESD204C interface between Altera FPGAs and TI AFEs, providing confidence in vendor interoperability
• A validated software configuration between the FPGA and AFE, with TI's Latte C library integrated directly into Altera's software, demonstrating ACLR and DPD performance (shown in the video) from a single software environment
• A fast path to radio deployment, with evaluation and configuration executable without switching between tools
• A scalable starting point for customers building 4T4R, 8T8R, or more channel-dense solutions

Figure 1. Interoperability Hardware Setup.

By examining the details, it’s easy to understand why TI’s AFE7769D pairs well with Altera’s Agilex devices. Because the AFE7769D integrates CFR + hardware-accelerated DPD into the AFE itself, system designers can shift dense DSP workloads out of the FPGA, freeing logic, reducing transceiver utilization, and improving overall radio efficiency. This offloading of DSP-heavy compute allows wireless designers the ability to scale among Altera’s broad portfolio and vendor-agnostic, JESD products, from one of the high-end Agilex 7 devices to one of the mid-range Agilex 5 devices.

Altera and TI’s collaboration with Hitek Systems makes radio development with Altera FPGAs simple and configurable. Hitek boards use a carrier card and configurable embedded System on Module, or eSOM, featuring Altera’s FPGAs (i.e., Agilex 7, Agilex 5) supporting a logic density range of 100K–2.7M logic elements, along with an FMC+ connector compatible with TI AFE evaluation modules.

Figure 2. Hitek System Carrier Board and Agilex FPGA-based eSOM options.

Please take a moment to check out TI’s video demonstration validating the interoperability between Agilex 7 and TI’s AFE7769D on Hitek’s Platform, showing a 3.5GHz center frequency with 100MHz of instantaneous bandwidth.

Altera's expertise goes beyond FPGA semiconductor devices, featuring wireless IP blocks and reference designs that help customers move fast and stand out. Altera's OpenRAN Radio Enablement Packages for both Macro cell and mMIMO, through JESD204B/C/D, provide vendor-agnostic AFE solutions with integrated 1588 PTP and SyncE, and 10G/25G eCPRI/CPRI interfaces. Together with Agilex® 7 and Agilex® 5 devices, these proven baseline IP platforms reduce development risk, accelerate time-to-market, and give FPGA developers the flexibility to support evolving 5G requirements, run early 6G trials, and address specialized NTN use cases where customization is critical.

These efforts provide wireless designers with a clear and confident path for Altera + TI customers, proving link stability, multichannel synchronization, and SerDes performance end-to-end.

Additional Resources:

• For an overview of Altera’s Wireless Solutions, including the O-RAN RU Macro & Micro offering, along with 6G AI RAN, mMIMO, and vRAN/Fronthaul, go to https://www.altera.com/fpga-solutions/wireless
• For Hitek’s Altera Agilex FPGA-based eSOM used in the interoperability and demos, go to https://www.altera.com/asap/offering/a1jui0000049udmmam/esom7c-2f
• To evaluate other options, TI AFE modules using the same base hardware, go to Hitek’s Agilex eSOM7 5G/Wireless Development Platform: https://hiteksys.com/fpga-platforms/agilex-5g-wireless-platform-ti