TI Unveils Two Small Cell Platforms

Having set out its stall for the voguish small cells market at this year's Mobile World Congress, Texas Instruments has followed up with an official product launch. It has unveiled two new systems-on-chip (SoCs) designed to be compatible with its existing base station products, but targeted at picocells and metrocells as well as the enterprise.

Focal Points:

• The main demand for these small base stations - which promise to use low cost backhaul and support low operating costs - is currently to fill out capacity in 3G networks, according to TI, though some carriers expect to build entire networks using dense collections of small cells in future roll-outs, especially of LTE.
• Brian Glinsman, general manager of communications infrastructure at TI's DSP systems group, believes that tiny, self-organizing base stations will grow to about 20% of the total sector in 3-5 years, from virtually nothing now. The firm's initial products for that hoped-for surge are the TCI6612 and TCI6614 SoCs, both with production-ready software. Both chips will sample in the third quarter of this year.
• The SoCs integrate a mixture of different processing elements, according to the company, including radio accelerators, network and security coprocessors, DSPs and an ARM processor. They support layers 1, 2 and 3 and transport processing for small cell base stations. Both use TI's C667x DSP family based on its KeyStone multicore architecture, which includes both fixed and floating point capabilities in a multicore DSP.
• The TCI6612, which has two C66x DSP cores and an ARM Cortex A8, supports 64 users but only one air interface at a time - 2G, 3G, HSPA or LTE. The TCI6614, featuring four C66x DSP cores and the Cortex A8, offers simultaneous dual-mode, running two standards at the same time, and can support 128 users together with MIMO antenna arrays.

Last month, TI announced a partnership with UK-based femtocell company Ubiquisys, which has mainly focused on the residential and enterprise markets, to attack the public access small cell space. This alliance will bring Ubiquisys' self-organizing capabilities, among other aspects of their femtocell systems, to TI's architecture. Established femtocell SoC maker Picochip still leads this silicon field, while Freescale also announced a single-chip platform for small base stations at MWC. Others will also play a role - analyst Stephane Teral of Infonetics told EETimes he would also pick out Altera, DesignArt, Mindspeed, Qualcomm and Xilinx.