Silicon vendors from opposite ends of the wireless supply chain are “meeting in the middle” as they compete to power small cells in the enterprise. Established macrocell chipset suppliers like Texas Instruments and Freescale face growing competition from mobile processor experts Qualcomm and Broadcom, as well as from companies that specialize primarily in small cell solutions.
Ethernet and the enterprise
At Small Cell World Summit in London last week it was clear that chip vendors recognize small cells for enterprise deployment as the market’s current sweet spot. Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and Cavium all launched new multi-mode small cell chips targeting enterprise customers. Tom Flanagan, director of technical strategy for digital signal processing systems at Texas Instruments, says many mobile operators are focusing on enterprise customers because they can take advantage of Ethernet as both a power supply and a backhaul solution.
“POE (power over Ethernet) is big,” said Flanagan. “The operators seem to have changed, or at least re-focused themselves on doing things for the enterprise.” He said his company’s goal with its new TCI6630K2L system-on-chip was to maximize power efficiency, performance, and flexibility in as small a package as possible. “We’ve [included] a lot of the ancillary parts that are required like for power management and for clocking,” he said. “We’re really close to having the entire suite; we certainly have the entire system on board and we’re close to having it be just a handful of chips to do a very, very full-featured small cell base station.”
As mobile operators rely on their customers’ POE to power small cell solutions, those that can minimize power use have a clear advantage from an operating cost perspective. “The majority of power consumption — 50 to 70% – occurs at the RF level,” said Nick Karter, vice president of business development and product management for Qualcomm. “So if the engineers can figure out a way to reduce power consumption by half that’s a significant improvement on the overall power budget.” Karter said that while Qualcomm does not provide power amplifiers in its new FSM99xx small cell chip, it does provide a digital front end that can “adapt and minimize a particular behavior” in order to cut power consumption. In creating the FSM99xx, Qualcomm also took advantage of its mobile device expertise, using a 28 nanometer process technology to create a quad-core processor for small cells.
Flanagan said Texas Instruments has made major strides in power efficiency by freeing up the A8 ARM cores in its new chipset. “We’re pulling frame rate processing on wireless networks off of the programmable elements, the ARM cores and the DSP cores, and handling those in hardware so that the software that you need to run on it is free to have the entire access to the DSP core and the ARM cores,” he explained.
LTE, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity
Whether deploying small cells in an enterprise or a dense urban area, operators want to support LTE, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity. Chip vendors are responding to this demand with multi-mode solutions. Dual-mode chipsets that support 3G and LTE began to appear a few months ago; now some vendors are adding Wi-Fi connectivity as well.
Qualcomm, which purchased Wi-Fi chipmaker Atheros two years ago, supports the 802.11ac/n Wi-Fi standard in its new FSM99xx 3G/LTE chipset for small cells. “We can access two unique product portfolios and IT portfolios – one at the access point and one at the UE (user equipment.) Very few companies can actually make that claim,” said Qualcomm’s Nick Karter. He said the modem for the company’s new small cell offering was created by DesignArt Networks, an Israeli company acquired by Qualcomm almost a year ago. The quad-core applications processor is based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon technology, found in many of the world’s leading smartphones.
Cavium also demonstrated a “tri-mode” solution (LTE, WCDMA and Wi-Fi) last week at COMPUTEX in Taiwan, adding WCDMA and Wi-Fi to its exisiting LTE system-on-a-chip. “Our 4G LTE solution is already in volume deployment today,” said Raj Singh, general manager of Cavium’s wireless broadband group. The company has said that South Korea has been a very important market, and that the government has kept Samsung out of the market for small cell processors in an effort to assist smaller companies. Cavium has jumped in, winning a number of carrier contracts with a user-friendly solution that is no bigger than an enterprise Wi-Fi access point.
Texas Instruments chose not to integrate Wi-Fi with its TCI6630K2L System-on-Chip. “There are a handful of [Wi-Fi] vendors that a carrier would want to use,” said Flanagan. “We did not want to integrate and lose a design based on Wi-Fi.”
Opportunity for carriers
When combined with network-based management applications, small cells can enable operators to offer enterprise customers features like mobile unified communications, mobile call recording, and local switching of voice traffic and context aware services. The Small Cell Forum is preparing a guide on enterprise deployments, scheduled for publication this December.
“The enterprise segment represents a huge opportunity for the mobile operator community, both in terms of increasing coverage but also with enterprise IT architects who are seeking to move all personal communications services on to mobile devices and “unwire” their organizations,” said Gordon Mansfield, chairman of the Small Cell Forum. “However, to date the enterprise has largely proven hard to target effectively.” That’s starting to change as equipment makers focus on helping operators find ways to unwire the enterprise, a movement that is sure to accelerate as this newest round of small cell chipsets comes to market.
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