TI offers new femtocell DSP family

BANGALORE, INDIA: Texas Instruments Inc. today announced a new family of DSPs (digital signal processors) enabling residential and enterprise femtocell manufacturers and service providers to reduce development time and deliver new products to market quickly.

TI’s family of multicore femtocell solutions includes a full portfolio of complementary analog solutions, support for Linux, and software solutions from TI third parties, Continuous Computing and mimoOn.

These DSPs provide a complete digital solution for HSPA applications, enabling low cost, fully programmable solutions and thus allowing OEMs (original equipment manufacturer) to offer reliable and adaptable femtocell products to market.

Using the software reference design available from Continuous Computing and mimoOn, which provides customers with software for Layer 1, 2 and 3 wireless protocol processing, OEMs can quickly develop femtocell products to provide increased wireless connectivity for streaming video files, interactive gaming, music sharing and other bandwidth-intense multimedia tasks.

TI’s femtocell product family includes the TMS320TCI6485 with two high-performance 850MHz C64x+ DSP cores delivering 1.7 GHz of overall performance for residential femtocell applications, and the TMS320TCI6489 which includes three 850MHz C64x DSPs delivering 2.55 GHz of performance for enterprise or “super femto” applications.

Scaling to meet the varied global requirements of the residential and enterprise market segments, TI’s TCI6485 supports up to eight users while the TCI6489 supports up to 32 users.

The entire product family is compatible with all major 2G/3G and 4G systems including GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, WiMAX and LTE, and furthermore, is code compatible with other TI DSPs for the wireless infrastructure market, where any previous investments in macro or pico base stations can be reused.

TI’s longstanding incumbency in the wireless infrastructure space combined with its robust DSP solutions developed specifically for the femtocell market allow OEMs to develop products for this emerging market with confidence.

Features and benefits of TCI6489 and TCI6485 femtocell DSPs:
* The new TCI6489 three-core DSP and TCI6485 dual-core DSP allows femtocell OEMs to use a single device for Layer 1, 2 & 3 processing, reducing the overall BOM (bill of materials) by eliminating the requirement for a separate microprocessor.

* Optimized for enterprise femtocell applications, the TCI6489 includes three 850 MHz cores, four lanes of Antenna Interface (CPRI/OBSAI) to connect to the analog front end, 3MB of L2 memory and dedicated accelerators for chip rate and forward error correction processing.

* Targeted for the residential femtocell market, the TCI6485 has two 850MHz C64x+ DSP cores that support both higher layer processing and lower layer processing. It also contains two lanes of Antenna Interface (CPRI/OBSAI) for analog RF connectivity, 2MB of L2 memory and dedicated accelerators.

* TI’s single chip solutions allow manufacturers to take advantage of a customized set of memory, peripheral, accelerator, core and performance features that make it the ideal processor for femtocell applications.

With TI’s complete WCDMA software solution for femtocell base stations supported by third parties, OEMs receive a fully operational and tested femtocell software solution, running on TI evaluation hardware, which speeds time-to-market and allows for increased development flexibility. Early versions of the software femtocell reference design will be available in 4Q09.

* TI also provides the complete analog signal chain for femtocell applications, including data converters, RF products, power management, clocks and amplifiers, which allow manufactures to develop a complete hardware femtocell solution from a single silicon supplier.