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TI and Ubiquisys push different views of enterprise femtocells

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 23 June, 2009

READ MORE: Femtocells

Vodafone may have stolen the limelight on the first day of the Femtocell World Summit, but there was plenty of other activity, with Texas Instruments launching platforms for residential and business products, and the established femto vendors focusing on new applications and the enterprise.

Texas Instruments put a cautious toe in femtocell waters in December, when it announced a version of its TCI6484 DSP platform - already established for larger base stations - targeted at small cells. Now it has announced two products specifically targeted at W-CDMA/HSPA femtocells, though they still run on the same DSP cores as macrocell systems. This raises questions over power and cost, but of course brings TI the benefits of targeting existing macrocell customers with a common architecture. And TI, coming down from the lofty heights of macro base stations, knows it is in a different position from the specialists that have started at the consumer end. So for now at least, it is firmly targeted at the enterprise and high end residential base, leveraging its installed base and its expertise in areas like 3G accelerators, while not having to compete on ultra-low cost and power.

Its justification for this stance is that progress in the enterprise femto market has accelerated, while TI remains unconvinced about when the consumer sector will achieve mass volume. At that point it is likely to announce new products optimized for low cost, high volume femtos (if it sees a profit in this, an issue TI executives have frequently raised over the past year, even considering moving the development to the firm's devices, rather than its infrastructure, business, where the economics of mass market products are central.) Josef Alt, EMEA marketing manager for wireless infrastructure, said: "A year ago there was a clear opinion that the residential market would need to be established first but the enterprises have proved more interested in a near term solution than expected so the two are developing more in parallel." On the residential side, he is more cautious: "It will take a longer time than many expect for femtos to ramp. Who knows when there will truly be high volume?"

The two products are the TCI6485, for eight-user residential femtocells, which Alt believes will mainly be used for high end consumer applications such as hotspots; and the TCI6489, for enterprise femtos supporting up to 32 users. Both support 16Mbps HSPA and functionality from layers one to three. The smaller platform has two cores and cell size up to 100 meters, while the larger one has an additional core, an additional 1Mb of L2 memory, and range of up to 200 meters. Femtocell software stack specialists MimoOn and Continuous Computing are supporting the architecture.

Among the benefits outlined by Alt are the integration of PHY and MAC on one device to reduce cost, and a range of accelerators, particularly the RAC hardware accelerator for chip rate processing. He also says the architecture is highly programmable to support any changes to standards. It can be applied to other 2G, 3G or 4G air interfaces, but has been optimized for W-CDMA/HSPA.

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