Texas Instruments TMS320C6416 DSP Delivers the Industry's Highest Performance for 3G Wireless Base Stations
Today wireless multimedia is moving from vision to reality. Operators are deploying the third-generation (3G) wireless base stations that enable callers to surf the Web, check e-mail, conduct videoconferences and access a wide range of new services from their wireless telephones. Users are already beginning to enjoy these services, as well as making voice calls from a much wider range of indoor and outdoor environments.
Underlying 3G innovations is Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) technology, which is pushing the expectations of wireless networks far beyond previous limitations. To deliver on the promise of WCDMA, 3G base stations must handle greater capacity, process higher data rates and support multimedia standards, while at the same time reducing size, cost and power consumption. The technology that enables WCDMA is high-performance digital signal processing, which provides the processing power and design flexibility required to implement 3G wireless base stations.
The new TMS320C6416 digital signal processor (DSP) from Texas Instruments (TI), one of the first products based on TI's groundbreaking TMS320C64x™ DSP platform, delivers more of this performance than any other processor. Operating at speeds up to 600 megahertz (MHz), the C6416 is the fastest DSP available and is designed specifically for high-performance, multichannel 3G wireless base stations. The C6416 provides nearly 15 times the symbol rate performance of TI's TMS320C6203, the industry's previous performance leader, for 12.2 kbps AMR voice channels. The C6203 is already being used for base station designs by most of the top 3G wireless OEMs worldwide. As these OEMs redesign their equipments for greater channel density with lower power consumption and lower cost per channel, they will be increasingly relying on the C6416 to achieve the level of signal processing they need to realize the full promise of 3G wireless technology.
A Leap Ahead in Wireless Technology
Third-generation standards like WCDMA (Japan), the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) (Europe), and Code Division Multiple Access 2000 (CDMA2000) (U.S.), place intense demands on the processing power and flexibility of base stations. In order to accommodate the simultaneous transmission of voice, data and video, transmissions must be scaled on a call-by-call basis so that the bandwidth of the channel matches that of the application. A video call, for instance, needs a great deal more bandwidth than an ordinary voice call, and a data transfer can use a varying amount of the available bandwidth. As a result, the WCDMA roadmap requires support for a wide range of data rates -- up to 384 kilobits per second (kbps) in mobile applications and up to 2 megabits per second (Mbps) in stationary applications. Adding to the complexity, new systems using WCDMA must be able to coexist across all continents and must be backward compatible with the wireless standards that are deployed today.
The outstanding performance of TI's C6416 allows OEMs to implement compute-intensive algorithms that maximize use of the full frequency band for WCDMA's spread spectrum transmission and scalable channels. In addition, performance allows OEMs to introduce more channels to their systems, helping them keep per-channel costs low in the highly competitive wireless market.
Pico base stations require a small footprint and demand as much processing per channel as Macro Base Stations. For these systems, high channel density must be accompanied by low power consumption. Components that consume less power dissipate less heat and can thus be packed more densely; they are also more reliable, keeping maintenance costs down. All of these requirements place great demands on the performance, scalability, programmability and power efficiency of 3G base stations. The programmable C6416 offers the flexibility needed for new standard implementations like WCDMA/UMTS/CDMA2000, allowing standard evolution, quick modification and decreased time to market.
The Right DSP Technology for 3G Base Stations
The C6416 DSP leverages the advanced very-long-instruction-word (VLIW) architecture of its C64x™ core with hardware innovations specifically designed to meet the demands of 3G wireless base stations. The core's eight functional units can complete up to four 16-bit multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations each cycle to achieve maximum parallelism in processing 3G algorithms.
C64x DSPs are capable of scaling to speeds faster than 1 gigahertz (GHz) and performance nearing 9,000 million instructions per second (MIPS). The architecture is also flexible enough to support additional features and multi-core designs for use in future, more powerful 3G wireless base stations.
Two coprocessors have been added to the C6416 in order to provide dedicated processing that dramatically speeds up the operation of key 3G algorithms and frees the programmable C64x core to function more flexibly and efficiently on other operations. A turbo coprocessor (TCP), performs turbo decoding on wireless data channels while aViterbi Coprocessor (VCP) performs convolutional decoding of voice channels.
System-Level Integration for Communications
System-level functionality on the C6416 speeds up development and enables OEMs to achieve the full performance entitlement of the device. To sustain data supply to the ultra-fast DSP core, the C6416 employs a two-level cache memory with a 16-kilobyte (KB) Level 1 data cache, a 16-KB Level 1 program cache, and a 1024-KB Level 2 unified data and program memory space. For greater flexibility, 256 KB of the Level 2 cache memory can be used as a second level of cache. A 64-channel enhanced direct memory access (EDMA) controller provides efficient management of more than 2 gigabytes per second (Gbps) of data I/O from system memory. Integrated peripherals that ease system configuration include an interface to the widely used PCI bus for host computers and a Utopia II interface for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) in telecommunications.
This high level of performance comes with excellent power efficiency as well. TI has employed many of the power-saving techniques it created for the ultra-low-power TMS320C55x™ DSP in the development of the new C6416. As a result, the C6416 operates with a typical power consumption of one-third the consumption of previous generation C6000 DSPs. In 3G base stations, this excellent power efficiency will enable OEMs to pack more channels in less space, saving costs in both manufacture and operation.
Fast Software Development From Existing Designs
Because the C6416 instruction set is a superset of the TMS320C62x™ DSP instruction set, OEMs can immediately use the software they have developed for their earlier-generation designs. The outstanding efficiency of the C64x C-compiler enables developers to create new code and modify existing code quickly, an important capability in the rapidly evolving 3G wireless field. In addition, TI's Code Composer Studio™ integrated development environment (IDE) offers the industry's most complete and advanced set of tools to ease the implementation of DSP code.
The C6416 DSP allows designers to develop differentiated 3G wireless technology through software instead of hardware. This emphasis helps speed up system development by allowing rapid response to changes in design requirements, and it permits developers to port their technology more easily to new systems. In addition, DSP-based systems can be reprogrammed more readily in the field so that service providers can keep their equipment up to date as standards evolve. All members of the C64x platform are object code-compatible with earlier C62x™ DSPs, so software initially compiled for previous devices, such as the C6203, will also run on the C6416.
Performance for Tomorrow's Wireless Multimedia
Wireless 3G telecommunications are now being deployed using TI DSP technology, and TI's new C6416 DSP will help OEMs drive 3G base stations to new levels of channel density and low per-channel costs. More than ever, the base station infrastructure for WCDMA requires high performance and efficiencies of cost, space and power consumption. As the fastest DSP available today, the C6416 offers all of these advantages, enabling wireless OEMs to build the base stations that will support tomorrow's multimedia applications.
More information regarding TI's wireless infrastructure solutions is available on the World Wide Web at www.dspvillage.ti.com/newc64xdsps .
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