Cavium announces shipment of OCTEON Fusion - industry's most powerful “base station-on-a-chip” family

SAN JOSE, USA: Cavium Inc. announced initial shipments of OCTEON Fusion small cell base station-on-a-chip family of SoC’s to Telecom Equipment Manufacturers (TEMs). The OCTEON Fusion family delivers breakthrough capacity and throughput for LTE small cell base stations, including micro, pico and enterprise femto base stations, through a high performance multi-core architecture.

OCTEON Fusion CNF71XX integrates Cavium’s award-winning OCTEON multi-core architecture along with purpose-built Baseband DSP cores, extensive LTE hardware accelerators and digital front end (DFE) features into a single chip.

The first release of this innovative new family of silicon includes four high performance MIPS64 cores and six DSPs, along with baseband hardware acceleration units interconnected with a low-latency crossbar and shared memory subsystem, allowing service of more than 128 connected users while delivering line-rate throughput for Uplink and Downlink. Compared to alternate solutions available today, OCTEON Fusion provides up to 4x greater performance within the same power and cost envelope.

Augmenting the macro cell network with a very large number of small cell base stations is essential to solving the mobile broadband capacity crunch and delivering 4G data throughput in a cost effective manner. For carriers to effectively deploy such a large and distributed radio access infrastructure, base stations need to be compact, inexpensive, easily manageable and energy efficient. Most of the TEMs and carriers are working to implement small cell based network topology and according to industry analysts, the small cell base station semiconductor market is expected to reach over $1 billion by 2016.

“With the shipment of OCTEON Fusion CNF71XX, service providers now have available unmatched carrier grade feature set and performance on all layers of LTE protocol in their small cell base stations,” said YJ Kim, GM of Cavium’s Infrastructure Products Group. “Increasing 4G momentum and consumers’ insatiable demand for mobile data are causing service providers to accelerate small cell deployments. OCTEON Fusion along with Cavium’s fully integrated and proven FusionStack™ LTE protocol software deliver standout performance while accelerating time to market for our TEM customers and their service provider customers.”

OCTEON Fusion’s innovative power efficient architecture allows the same scalable architecture to be deployed on both indoor and outdoor radio access solutions. Additionally, OCTEON Fusion maintains the same OCTEON architecture used in OCTEON II SoC’s that are widely deployed by several Tier 1 wireless OEM’s in their macro base stations and radio network equipment, enabling seamless reuse of existing software modules.

Cavium is currently sampling OCTEON Fusion CNF71XX to select customers. The OCTEON Fusion reference platform ships with comprehensive RF solutions that work in multiple bands and a complete set of fully optimized deployment ready software.