TI diving into the femto silicon market

Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN) today unveiled two new chipsets targeted at femtocells, both the result of TI scaling down the ultra-powerful digital signal processors (DSPs) used in cellular base stations to the more limited needs of the home and office access point.

The products, however, go beyond the typical capabilities of many femtocells designed to handle only a handful of simultaneous phone calls or data sessions. It’s residential femto DSP is a dual-core processor that can support eight simultaneous users, while its enterprise femto architecture is a triple-core DSP—a ‘super femto’—supporting up to 32 simultaneous UMTS phone calls or high-speed packet access (HSPA) data session.

TI’s own market research determined that operators and users are looking for more powerful femto platforms that perform more like picocell base stations, said Debbie Greenstreet, strategic marketing manager in TI’s wireless infrastructure group. Consequently, TI decided it would base the designs on its heavyweight macro network architecture, creating not only a more powerful femtocell but one built on an established, market-proven platform, Greenstreet said. “There are effectively scaled down derivatives of what we’ve previously focused only on the macro market,” Greenstreet said.

The programmable DSP architecture incorporates not only the baseband processor but media access control and physical layer elements as well as the varying wireless protocol processing software that connects the femto back to operator’s network. Greenstreet said most of the larger vendors have developed their own standards-based or proprietary software, but to support smaller vendors, TI is partnering with Continuous Computing and MimoOn to offer their reference designs.

TI announced the new family of DSPs at the Femtocells World Summit in London where several other vendors made announcements:

§ The Femto Forum launched a special interest group tasked with creating a framework for femtocell-based services and applications. The Forum believes femtos won’t just be used to expand coverage and capacity, but also as a home networking hubs that can, for instance, synchronize music between a PC and multimedia phone or send alerts to users when they arrive or leave home.

§ Intellinet added support for the 3GPP’s new IUB interface standard to its femto gateway. Since the 3GPP approved the new standard in April, vendors have been racing to bring their products to market as many operators have delayed deploying femtocells until standardized gear was available.

§ Airvana and VeriSign said they are working together on security certificate software for femtocells that can be used to authenticate a femtocell trying to link to a carrier’s core network through the public Internet.