TI delivers single chip baseband solution

Texas Instruments (TI) has introduced the TCI6484, its first first DSP to combine PHY and MAC processing on a single chip. The TCI6484 targets cellular infrastructure applications such as HSPA/HSPA+, LTE and WiMAX Wave 2. The new 65nm chip features a C64x+ DSP core clocked at 1 GHz and includes accelerators and peripherals optimized for cellular infrastructure products. TI has also boosted memory performance, increasing the L2 cache to 2 Mbytes from 256k in the previous generation TCI6482. It also increased the speed of the DDR2 interface from to 667 MHz from 533 MHz.

Figure 1. The TCI6484.

TI reports that the TCI6484 can handle symbol rate processing at 34Mbps, making it suitable for higher-density, lower-cost base stations. The TCI6484 supports symbol rate processing needed for multiple sectors or carriers for multiple air interfaces including GSM-EDGE, Evolved EDGE, WCDMA, HSPA/HSPA+, TDS-CDMA, WiMAX Wave 2 and LTE.

TI also offers optimized software libraries for WiMAX Wave 2, LTE and HSPA+. Developed and tested within TI's carrier-class environment, the inclusion of this software allows base station manufacturers to focus on their own system-level software. System level testing can be accomplished with a hardware development card that supports two TCI6484 devices.

To further ease OEMs design effort, TI offers a complete portfolio of high performance analog products, including optimized RF products, high performance data converters, clock devices and power management products.

The TCI6484 will be sampling in 1Q with targeted cellular infrastructure customers and will be available to the broader market in 3Q08. It will be on display at the Mobile World Congress Conference in Barcelona. For more information visit www.ti.com/beyond3g

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