Comptel: TI unveils residential gateway products

ORLANDO--Texas Instruments this morning announced five new solutions for manufacturers of residential gateways, based on its UR8 processor architecture. The new xDSL chips are aimed at enabling maximum flexibility and functionality in the design of residential gateway products.

The UR8 architecture is designed with an advanced multimedia gateway processor, a programmable DSL PHY or physical layer, a high-performance DSP-based voice sub-system for VoIP and local area network (LAN) interfaces. It includes multiple processors for managing broadband distribution to enhance throughput and an application program interface to enable new services to be introduced quickly and take advantage of the system’s full range of capabilities.

The product family is designed to support not only ADSL but also VDSL2 as that is introduced by service providers to support IPTV.

“The UR8 is a much more complex product in that it supports more features and more interfaces,” said Tina Rogers, manager of worldwide product marketing for Cable, DSL and wireless LAN chip sets focused on the home.
“The goal is to support those additional services, those IP services that will provide that additional revenue stream for the operator. Our chip set is integrating voice within the chip, which used to be external because we believe that’s the right thing to do. We see service providers wanting to support VoIP over DSL, as well as IPTV.”

And while the new UR8 products don’t provide the specific IPTV function they do deliver the higher bandwidth and more complex routing that IPTV requires and can be deployed with DaVinci, TI’s media processor that supports IPTV, Rogers said.

TI also is supporting fixed/mobile convergence, with support for up to four channels of wireline or wireless voice. A programmable voice subsystem allows manufacturers to leverage TI’s extensive voice codec library and Telogy Software for VoIP, including wideband codecs, wireline and wireless codecs, and advanced features such as fax and modem relay, packet-loss minimization and noise-reducing algorithms, the company said in announcing the new products.

“With VoIP, there is a lot of things that operators are trying to think about, like how can they differentiate their solutions from cable guys and CLECs,” Rogers said. “One of the things we started to see is now operators are starting to take a position in an FMC scenario where a customer has a dual mode phone – VoIP and GSM – when they are out and about in their car, they are on GSM but at home switches to home network. One of the challenges is every time you have to change from one type of voice codec technology to another, that transcoding results in a degradation of voice quality. By incorporating GSM codecs within my gateway, the voice doesn’t have to be transcoded to go from the GSM network to within the home. We have wireless chip sets and we can do that.”

For maximum flexibility, TI also is support multiple in-home networks including Multimedia over Cable Alliance, HomePlug, HPNA and wireless LANs, she said.