NEW YORK-Texas Instruments announced eight of the world’s top 10 producers of third-generation wireless base stations said they plan to use TI’s latest and fastest digital signal processor in their designs.
Texas Instruments would not identify the eight companies, instead supplying Dataquest rankings of the top 10 original equipment manufacturers of next-generation wireless base stations.
From one to 10, they are: Alcatel Althsom, L.M. Ericsson, Fujitsu Corp., Lucent Technologies Inc., Motorola Inc., NEC Corp., Nokia Oy, Nortel Networks, Qualcomm Inc. and Siemens AG.
The TMS320C6203 fixed-point digital signal processor, which operates at 300 MHz and can process 2,400 million instructions per second, is the fastest DSP available today.
“No one else is anywhere even close … This is a triple home run,” said Pradeep Bardia, product marketing manager for Texas Instruments in Stafford, Texas.
Third-generation wireless services will need that processing capability at the base-station level in order to fulfill the promises of video conferencing, imaging and multimedia clips, he said.
Furthermore, the baseband processing functions of smart antennas and software radio also require a lot of MIPS capability, Bardia added.
The new DSP, which can be used on all competing 3G standards, also provides 7 Mbits of integrated static random-access memory.
“It offers the largest amount of memory integration on a single core DSP,” Bardia said.
The TMS320C6203 also is an energy miser, using 0.15-micron, L-effective process technology to reduce power consumption, Texas Instruments said.
The Y2K-compliant DSP also is backward compatible with second-generation wireless systems, Bardia said.
