TI rolls out KeyStone based SoC for PoE+, pico deployments

Texas Instruments recently unveiled what it claims as the industry's most power and BOM optimised small cell solution for developers of indoor enterprise PoE+ and outdoor pico base stations. TI's new KeyStone-based TCI6630K2L System-on-Chip (SoC) offers small cell developers a single hardware and software platform to address multiple indoor and outdoor use cases.

Combined with TI's Base Station SoftwarePac and new analogue front end transceiver, the AFE7500, the TCI6630K2L takes a quantum leap into solving the ever pervasive challenges impeding on the small cell market by meeting the most stringent power, and cost requirements of base stations, without compromising performance and features.

The TCI6630K2L is designed as a PoE+ capable platform. It enables OEMs to develop a scalable product portfolio of high-performance indoor small cells, for up to 128 users. The SoC combines L1/L2/L3 base band performance with a fully integrated digital radio front end (DRFE), enabling it to meet single band, dual band, simultaneous dual mode and carrier aggregation scenarios all within a PoE+ power budget. The device also provides the headroom needed to meet higher end requirements, allowing operators to future proof and scale their platform for both indoor and outdoor deployments with a single solution.

The TCI6630K2L also uses a dual ARM Cortex-A15 RISC processors and four of TI's fixed- and floating-point TMS320C66x digital signal processor (DSP) generation cores as part of the company's KeyStone SoC architecture. The PoE+ designed solution takes power reduction to another level by integrating DRFE features such as crest factor reduction (CFR) and digital pre-distortion (DPD).

TI's TCI6630K2L and AFE7500 provide a small cell solution that drives higher power amplifier efficiency, reducing the overall power requirements by up to 8W for indoor scenarios. Even at 125mW of output power, close to 2W of power savings per antenna can be achieved by the integrated CFR and DPD in the TCI6630K2L. The TCI6630K2L interfaces to the AFE7500 via a standard JESD204B connection, further reducing small cell base station board space by eliminating the need for external glue logic between the RF transceiver and digital base band.

The chip includes a powerful network co-processor that supports transport capacities of up to 3mpps, enabling traffic aggregation and shaping of 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi combined transport. It also integrates a full 4-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch further eliminating the need for an external switch and other components.