Today, TI introduced two 3G chipsets, one for handsets and one for base stations. Although TI and other vendors have long offered handset chipsets, TI’s base station chipset is the first from a major semiconductor vendor. ASIC-plus-DSP designs dominate the base station market for a number of reasons, including high computational loads, power constraints, and cost pressures. Nonetheless, TI says the superior cost and performance of its chipset will enable it to displace ASIC-based designs.
The chipset consists of a TCI100 DSP, a TC110 transmit ASSP, and a TC120 receive ASSP. The TCI100 is essentially a TMS320C6416, a processor used widely in today’s base station designs. The TCI100 is projected to operate at 720 MHz, 20% faster than the fastest ’C6416.
The TC120 contains a pool of accelerators for spreading and other transmit functions. These accelerators can be allocated to channels as needed. Similarly, the TC110 contains pools of accelerators for de-spreading and other receive functions. In essence, these ASSPs are application-specific reconfigurable processors similar to those from MorphICs and PicoChip—companies that also target base stations. Base station-oriented reconfigurable processors have also received attention from Motorola, which recently invested in Morpho Technologies.
According to TI, its chipset will offer up to twice the channel density of an ASIC-based design. TI says most of this gain comes from an efficient interface between the DSP and ASSPs. TI acknowledges that ASIC designers could implement a similar interface, but claims its intimate knowledge of the ’C64xx gives it a leg up in this area. The TI chipset also has an advantage in that it supports the recently finalized HSDCA standard, which enables higher data download rates for mobile data users.
TI also says that its chipset will cost far less than ASIC-based designs. While this may be true, TI’s potential customers are likely to be more concerned about risk than about cost. Base stations are extraordinarily complex systems, and base station manufacturers have huge investments in their designs. Moving to TI’s chipset will require a massive porting effort, and this may slow acceptance of TI’s chipset just as it has slowed acceptance of solutions from vendors like MorphICs and PicoChip.
Moving from in-house designs to TI’s chipset will also increase manufacturers’ dependence upon TI’s long-term road-map. Unlike the start-ups that pioneered innovative base-station chip architectures, TI is a large, established vendor with little risk of collapsing overnight. Nevertheless, TI must convince its prospective customers that it has a solid long-term strategy—and that it will execute that strategy—before those customers will give its new chipset serious consideration.
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