Tata Elxsi intros LTE software solution optimized for Cavium Networks OCTEON processors

BARCELONA, SPAIN & BANGALORE, INDIA: Tata Elxsi Ltd, a leading embedded product design company and part of the $70 billion Tata group, announced its collaboration with Cavium Networks, a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, wireless, storage, video and security applications, offering LTE eNodeB solutions on the Cavium OCTEON Plus processor family.

Tata Elxsi’s LTE eNodeB protocol stack with a proven and highly-scalable architecture provides two variants, for high capacity macro and micro base stations and low capacity pico and femtocells.

This combination of Tata Elxsi’s LTE software stacks and Cavium’s OCTEON Plus multi-core processor family, which boasts 1 to 16-core MIPS64 architecture with market-leading performance and advanced hardware acceleration, offers equipment vendors an optimized multi-variant solution which scales from femto to macro.

Customers also benefit from Tata Elxsi’s full system development expertise, which provides cost benefits and time-to-market advantages. Various features like hardware-software partitioning and interface definition facilitate easy optimization for multi-core operations and best utilization of platform hardware acceleration.

The LTE eNodeB solution encompasses components like PDCP, RLC, MAC, RRC, RRM and RoHC developed by Tata Elxsi, that are fully compliant with LTE 3GPP Release 8 specifications. Tata Elxsi had defined a generic descriptor-based MAC-PHY interface in a transport-independent fashion enabling it to be interfaced with various physical interconnect options like GigE/PCIe/SRIO.

The Tata Elxsi eNodeB solution also implements an OAM interface layer for system configuration and monitoring purposes. Tata Elxsi’s state-of-the-art solution is designed with flexible SAP-based interfaces, allowing easy integration of third party components and product differentiator algorithms.

The Tata Elxsi LTE eNodeB solution has been integrated with TEL-developed PHY layers based on leading DSPs and well tested against third party UEs. With Tata Elxsi’s market-leading WiMAX base station software, this solution presents customers with a powerful option of a common 4G hardware platform to target both LTE and WiMAX. With over two decades of experience in product design and telecom engineering, Tata Elxsi provides unparalleled expertise in the development of LTE products for equipment manufacturers.

“Equipment manufacturers can enable early delivery of LTE products with this solution, as they can focus on productization, while we help in the solution building and integration” said Nitin Pai, Vice President, Marketing, Tata Elxsi Ltd.

“The key differentiator in our solution is our ability to offer flexible architectures scaling from femto to macro with dynamic load-balancing capabilities. The combination of a scalable and proven solution and a well established COTS hardware eco-system will provide customers with the benefits of reduced development costs and time-to-market.”

“It is exciting to have a common platform 4G solution that addresses both the LTE and WiMAX markets using the Tata Elxsi software and the Cavium OCTEON processor platforms” said YJ Kim, Senior Director, Embedded Processor Group, Cavium Networks. “This will allow our joint customers to deploy 4G wireless in a very time-effective manner.”

The Cavium Networks OCTEON multi-core MIPS64 family of processors provides the industry’s most advanced hardware accelerators for key LTE functions such as packet processing, compression, security (IPsec, KASUMI, SNOW 3G), DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) and quality of service.

The combined Tata Elxsi LTE eNodeB and Cavium OCTEON Plus processor solution is available now.