As a multicore processor, the TCI6488 has the power necessary to handle the most computationally intensive tasks. In a W-CDMA basestation, the TCI6488 can handle search/rake receiver tasks as well as receiver chip rate processing, which are typically three of the most computationally intensive tasks in W-CDMA, entirely on chip.

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TI also pairs the TCI6488 with application-specific libraries, such as WCDMA-HSPA, LTE, and WiMAX software libraries. These options help further reduce development costs and time-to-market, and they free systems designers to focus on developing more market-differentiating features.

Systems designers also can use the TCI6488 for a variety of basestation form factors, from macrocells down to picocells. For example, the TCI6488 can support 48 users per device in an HSDPA macro basestation. This density enables systems designers to create highly compact basestations, which are attractive to wireless carriers because they require less shelter space and thus lower lease fees.

The TCI6488’s flexibility is key because one size doesn’t fit all operators or technologies. Some basestation vendors and service providers believe that 4G networks will have to use picocells extensively or even exclusively to deliver the bandwidth that helps differentiate them from their wired and wireless competitors. So with the TCI6488, systems designers can quickly adapt to whichever form factor or factors the marketplace winds up demanding.

Like many other TI DSPs, the TCI6488 includes TI’s SmartReflex technology, which reduces overall power consumption while optimizing performance. As a result, SmartReflex gives systems designers another tool for reducing power consumption, which is a growing concern among wireless carriers and thus a market-differentiation opportunity for basestation vendors. Low power consumption also is a major asset when selling into developing countries, where basestations often have to rely on solar power, generators, or batteries because the electrical grid is expensive, unreliable, or both.

The TCI6488 includes 32 Kbytes of L1 program memory, 32 Kbytes of L1 data memory, and 3 Mbytes of total L2 memory in two configurations. It also has Viterbi (VCP2) and Turbo (TCP2) accelerators, with available receive accelerator co-processor (RAC). It offers support for RapidIO peripherals and antenna interface support for the Open Base Station Architecture Initiative (OBSAI) and the Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI), enabling up to 48 antenna streams per basestation. This feature also lets systems designers meet the market demand for multi-sector, multi-antenna basestations that can support a high density of users over large coverage areas.

New Freedom, New Responsibilities

Multicore DSPs are changing more than just basestations. They are also changing the way that systems designers approach their products. For instance, multicore DSPs require a fundamental change in programming—from sequential to parallel. It is now critical to step back and take time to figure out how a device’s workload could or should be divvied up. The system designer must determine what can or cannot be divided into parallel tasks and design the system accordingly.

There are other fundamental changes. For example, with multiple cores working on large amounts of data, peripherals that govern data input and output must become faster to keep up. These peripherals should be able to distribute the data to the appropriate core autonomously, without CPU intervention. Another important consideration for multicore system development is how the multiple cores interact with shared resources. It is critical that the system designers and programmers have ways of ensuring that the different cores do not interfere with each other, which is a problem that did not exist in the single-core devices.

The new generation of multicore DSPs provides infrastructure vendors and system designers with a powerful way to meet operators’ needs for 3G and 4G, including helping operators meet their capital expenditure and operational expenditure goals. But at the same time, they must be designed with new features and considerations that allow customers to use them as effectively as possible.

Manish Patel is a product manager with the Communications Infrastructure Business Unit, DSP Systems, at Texas Instruments. He has a 17-year career focus in the wireless industry with marketing experience in mobile terminals/PDAs, WiMAX network equipment and customer premise equipment (CPE) devices, cordless phones, WLAN equipment, and baseband DSP silicon products. He received a bachelor’s of science degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University and a master’s of science degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University. He can be reached at mnp@ti.com.

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