Wireless SoC Doubles LTE Performance

Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) has unveiled a multistandard wireless base station system-on-chip (SoC) that delivers double the LTE performance and a 2x power/performance improvement over existing macro and compact base station SoC solutions developed in 40nm process technology. Based on TI’s TMS320C66x digital signal processor (DSP) generation, the TMS320TCI6618 utilizes a strategic design approach that accelerates the well-defined standard aspects of LTE. In addition, the programmable DSP cores allow customer differentiation in advanced techniques such as scheduling and multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) antenna processing.

As wireless data rates increase with high-speed 3G and 4G services, the ability to efficiently handle the high numbers of bits flowing through base stations becomes critically important in SoC design. With the TCI6618, TI is introducing new hardware acceleration focused on this bit-rate processing, which increases the SoC system performance and enables advanced receiver algorithms, achieving higher spectral efficiencies than competitive solutions. For the first time in an integrated base station SoC, TI’s innovative architecture enables iterative decoding techniques, such as turbo interference cancellation, which can yield up to 40 percent or more spectral efficiency over conventional decoding techniques. These techniques, coupled with the powerful MIMO processing capabilities of TI’s new fixed/floating point C66x DSP core, yield a SoC that delivers on the promise of 4G.

“TI is effectively breaking the constraints of Moore’s Law with their new base station SoC, by doubling performance in less than six months and not changing any process nodes to achieve it,” said Jagdish Rebello, Senior Director and Principal Analyst, IHS-iSuppli. “Wireless infrastructure developers stand to benefit from these advancements in performance, features and time to market, all suited for the demands of 4G networks.”

The TCI6618 complements TI’s recently announced TCI6616 wireless base station SoC. Both solutions are pin and software compatible, offering customers complete flexibility in designing multistandard base stations supporting all 2G, 3G and 4G standards. This flexibility simplifies operators’ migration to 4G and allows base station manufacturers to develop a wider portfolio of solutions at a lower cost, lower power, and in less time than with competing solutions.

Developed on TI’s KeyStone multicore architecture and powerful new C66x DSP cores, TCI6618 enables scalability and portability from macro to small cells while reducing product development expenses. The device's advanced C66x cores with integrated floating point capability provide full programmability and 5x performance improvement in critical algorithms such as MIMO and scheduling—both key areas of differentiation for customers.

Texas Instruments