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Texas Instruments gave the nascent femtocell market a major endorsement yesterday when it made its first public announcement of a product for the miniature base stations. The DSP giant had previously been sitting firmly on the fence about femtocells, but now becomes the first major to show its hand.

Looking behind the headlines, TI remains cautious about the market opportunity, and has taken few risks. Its product, the TCI6484, is not specifically designed for femtocells, unlike some dedicated products coming to market from start-ups like picoChip. It can be used for any size of base station, and can support all the 2G and 3G wireless standards plus LTE and WiMAX. This means that TI has, so far at least, committed little R&D resource specifically to femtocells, and admits its DSP is not optimized for femtos, nor achieving the kind of economics that will be necessary for the mass market.

Josef Alt, VP of business development at TI's infrastructure group, estimates that a femtocell based on the 6484 would have a bill of materials of about $200, which is a far cry from the $100 purchase price that operators are demanding for wide scale deployment. Earlier this year, Arnon Friedmann, head of software in the infrastructure division, said the company "had yet to make the economics work" of creating a dedicated platform for such a low cost product, and speculated that the project might live better within the TI devices business. Alt accepted that the challenge had not yet been met - hence the decision to stake a claim in the market, but with a non-specific offering.

This approach will have some advantages, in that users of the TI architecture in larger cells will be able to adapt their existing software relatively easily for smaller base stations - unlike the start-ups, TI has no intention of creating a reference platform and expects its customers to do the main bulk of the software for the femtocell. The 6484 DSP has integrated MAC and PHY functionality on a single core, processing capacity of up to 34Mbps.

This would suggest that TI's main hunting ground will be among its existing customers as they extend their range, and the company claims to have its DSPs already installed within a large number of the femtocells that are currently involved in operator trials. It named Samsung, Airvana, Huawei, ZTE and Airhop among its users, though without specifying products or operator deployments, but there is a hint that its first successes have been weighted towards the CDMA market, where there has been some early activity from operators like Sprint Nextel.

TI's caution, it stresses, is about timing not the market opportunity itself. "It's when not if for femtocells," commented Alt, who expects real volumes from late 2010, at which point the $100 price point will be achievable and TI is likely to have a more specialized product. Indeed, it is striking the classic balance for a tier one vendor, taking few risks but stealing a march on other majors like Qualcomm - which, outside CDMA, is widely expected to wait until 2010 or skip straight to LTE.

For the start-ups, TI's public entry is a double-edged sword, throwing up a powerful competitor with strong industry ties and channels, but also adding welcome credibility to a new technology. TI has joined the Femto Forum, joining four more specialized chip companies - picoChip, RadioFrame, Lime Microsystems and Percello.

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