Mindspeed joins Femto Forum to support growth of multi-core processing technology in small-cell base station platforms

Mobile World Congress 2011, NEWPORT BEACH, USA: Mindspeed Technologies Inc., a leading supplier of semiconductor solutions for network infrastructure applications, has joined the Femto Forum, a not-for-profit membership organization founded in 2007 to promote femtocell deployment worldwide.

The Femto Forum’s goal is to drive worldwide adoption of femtocell technology. As a member, Mindspeed will contribute to the technical advancement of femtocell and picocell products and services through active participation in working groups, standardization initiatives and technical presentations.

Mindspeed offers the industry’s only system-on-chip (SoC) solution for 3G and Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks that enables base station designs to be scaled from enterprise femtocells supporting several users to large macrocells supporting thousands of mobile subscribers.

“We are committed to being an active participant in the Femto Forum, and are uniquely positioned to further performance improvements and cost efficiencies to femtocells, picocells and the full range of base station platforms,” said Alan Taylor, director of marketing for the communications convergence processing business unit at Mindspeed. “As mobile operators migrate to next-generation air-interface standards, they are using a variety of small- to large-cell configurations to fill in today’s 3G coverage/performance gaps, and to offload mobile data traffic as loads intensify. The femtocell platform is an increasingly critical piece of that puzzle.”

“We are excited that Mindspeed has joined the Femto Forum,” said Simon Saunders, chairman of the Femto Forum. “The Forum is working hard to expand our partner ecosystem, and Mindspeed brings key expertise and an important new perspective that recognizes the critical role that femto technologies are playing in today’s massive mobile-infrastructure upgrade to new 4G standards. We look forward to working closely with Mindspeed in Femto Forum working groups.”

Mindspeed’s Transcede family represents a new class of SoC silicon designed to overcome the computational challenges and complexities presented by today’s explosion of mobile video and data traffic as today’s operators support a flood of new smart phones and other wireless devices while executing a massive infrastructure upgrade to new 4G standards.

To improve coverage and flexibility, macrocell base stations are being augmented with a variety of compact platforms including microcells, picocells and metro femtocells. This has created the need for a common silicon platform that enables equipment manufacturers to port software across multiple designs. Transcede delivers this common platform as the first 64-user “picocell on a chip” that allows designers to port software from one design to another across the full range of base station sizes and configurations.

Transcede family of SoCs integrates an unprecedented 26 programmable processors into a single device, including two ARM Cortex A9 multi-core symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processors, 10 CEVA digital signal processors (DSPs) and ten DSP accelerators that support the complete wideband code-division multiple access (W-CDMA), LTE or WiMAX (Layers 1, 2 and above) processing needs of single- and multi-sector base stations.

The Transcede family of SoCs can deliver three sectors of LTE processing in a single device, while still providing substantial processing headroom, allowing manufacturers to deploy their own value-added features as part of an overall Transcede-based solution.