Service Providers can Accelerate Femtocell Trials and Deployments with New Solutions from Texas Instruments

(Product News, 4 Dec 2008)

Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) is providing equipment manufacturers the necessary tools for success in the femtocell market with its new high-performance, volume-based digital signal processor (DSP) solution. By leveraging years of proven TI technology already deployed in their networks, service providers can confidently initiate femtocell trials such as those currently underway with Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, Softbank and others. TI's technology is currently shipping into femtocell products from Samsung, Airvana, Huawei, Lyrtech, ZTE and Airhop.

According to Jagdish Rebello, director and principal analyst with iSuppli, volume shipments for femtocells could begin in 2010 if the technical challenges and business case issues can be resolved. "The participation of a company like TI is needed to address cost models and deployment challenges facing the femtocell market. With its incumbent position in wireless infrastructure—across all air interfaces—they bring a tremendous amount of knowledge to this emerging market."

The global market for femtocell solutions is diverse, with service providers requiring adaptable solutions. TI's DSP-based products support all major 2G/3G and 4G solutions including GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, WiMAX and LTE. These femtocell products leverage TI's market-leading installed base of wireless and wired infrastructure silicon and software. Understanding the service providers' network architecture and requirements is critical to successful femtocell trials and deployments and roughly 90 percent of the world's operators have TI's technology deployed in their networks.

"Airvana chose TI's DSP because it allowed us to implement both CDMA2000 1xRTT voice and data, and EV-DO broadband data on a single programmable chip," says Sanjeev Verma, VP of femtocell business and corporate development, and co-founder, Airvana. "Having the flexibility to offer a broad and constantly growing feature set is a critical part of our strategy for this market."

Solution shipping to market leaders
TI is currently shipping its DSP solutions to several femtocell OEMs. Traditional wireless infrastructure OEMs can leverage the TMS320TCI6484, which offers both MAC and PHY processing without external ASICs or FPGAs. This programmable product allows for field firmware upgrades and enables infrastructure OEMs to cost-effectively enter the femtocell market. As the market matures, this SoC + accelerators solution will enable basestation OEMs to design optimized solutions.

Networking and cable equipment manufacturers will find the C6000-based DSP platform easy to use giving OEMs multiple ways to architect their systems to meet unique service provider requirements. Leveraging TI's experience in cable, DSL, Voice over IP, networking, WLAN and wireless handsets, OEMs can have confidence that their TI-based products will speed trials and deployments with all types of service providers.

TI is also working with leading femtocell software provider Continuous Computing to port their Trillium Femtocell Access Point software stack to the TCI6484. By offering this solution bundle, OEMs can rapidly deploy carrier-class femtocell products.

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