Mindspeed Technologies has unveiled new SoC offerings targeting low-power requirements and heavy processing demands of mobile broadband basestation platforms, from enterprise femtocells to macrocells.
According to Mindspeed Technologies, the Transcede family of SoCs integrates 26 programmable processors into a single device, including two ARM Cortex A9 multi-core symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processors, 10 CEVA DSPs and 10 DSP accelerators.
The new offering supports the processing needs of single- and multi-sector basestations using the wideband code-division multiple access (W-CDMA), long term evolution (LTE), LTE time-division duplex (TD-LTE, in China), time-division synchronous code division multiple access (TD-SCDMA, in China), and/or WiMAX air-interface standards, the company said.
Mindspeed said that the Transcede family of products can be used to develop 4G equipment for LTE frequency division duplex (LTE-FDD), TD-LTE, TD-SCDMA, in China, and WiMAX 802.16d, 16e and 16m, as well as 3G W-CDMA NodeB systems. Its hardware architecture enables the same software to be used for picocells, microcells and macrocell basestations.
Transcede family devices include the new Cortex A9 multi-core SMP RISC processors from ARM, coupled with the new DSP processors from CEVA and include built-in hardware accelerators for fixed functions and integrate other system features to reduce system costs. The integrated SoC reduces system latency, the company said.
The Transcede family of products debuts with the T4000, whose processor cores run at 600 MHz, with less than 12W power consumption, and the T4020, with 750MHz processor cores and power consumption less than 15W. The reference design includes a Linux board support package, and standard physical-layer (PHY) implementation for LTE, WiMAX and W-CDMA, with associated utilities and test scripts.
Alan Taylor, marketing director of multiservice access business unit at Mindspeed, said: “Transcede family devices can cut power consumption to less than 15 watts for sub-$300 blades, with significantly better performance, lower complexity, simplified programming and scalability, and a smaller footprint.
“Transcede SoCs will help redefine wireless infrastructure economics during what is expected to be a major basestation upgrade cycle – one that may be further accelerated as mobile devices rapidly become the remote controls for a variety of exciting new, real-time cloud-based social networking services and e-commerce models.”
