Texas Instruments Offers a Two-chip Wireless Backhaul Solution, TCI6631K2L

Meeting the mobile backhaul challenges in handling Ethernet and legacy TDM traffic at a reduced system cost and power consumption is Texas Instruments (TI). The company has met those requirements with the industry's most flexible backhaul System-on-Chip (SoC), the TCI6631K2L. This is a high performance, low power solution for Non Line of Sight (NLOS) wireless backhaul, explains TI, a global semiconductor design and manufacturing company that develops analog ICs and embedded processors.

Texas Instruments unveiled recently its new TCI6631K2L SoC, designed specifically to address the need for higher bandwidth in mobile backhaul, as a scalable low-power baseband solution with an integrated digital radio front end (DRFE) that meets the more stringent power, size and bill of materials (BOM) cost requirements to manage the massive growth in wireless traffic.

As per a post reported on the PR Newswire website, The TCI6631K2L leverages dual ARM Cortex-A15 RISC processors and quad TMS320C66x DSP cores with fixed- and floating-point processing able to deliver the processing speed needed to ensure the responsiveness that wireless users expect in carrying “yottabits” of traffic. The TI's KeyStone-based TCI6631K2L provides developers a common Software Defined Radio (SDR) programmable platform to address the varied configurations of wireless backhaul to adapt to nearly any frequency band for NLOS spectrum from TV white space (TVWS) (UHF/VHF) to 6GHz and Line-of-Sight (LOS) up to 86GHz. 

Another capability of the TCI6631K2L SoC is the support for small cell LOS connectivity (i.e., providing a wireless backhaul solution for line-of-site installations in macro base stations, relays, and aggregators).

In sum, various aspects of the TCI6631K2L SoC makes it an apt embedded processing solution for the backhaul market (much like the new QorIQ Qonverge B3421 device) that continues to evolve. It combines all the high-throughput digital processing into one optimized processing unit designed to simplify requirements of wireless backhaul and offer scalability and adaptability, which are essential today. Moreover, it offers “the highest levels of integration with the flexibility to meet a variety of end product configurations. TI's TCI6631K2L two-chip wireless backhaul solution provides just that; a fully integrated analog and digital solution with a minimal footprint and power profile, enabling a complete design in a small package within a POE+ power footprint,” explains the post.

The KeyStone II architecture on which the TCI6631K2L SoC is based affords the scalability and flexibility within the device itself. The SoC is comprised of an integrated Network Coprocessor (NCP) that includes a packet accelerator as well as extensive security accelerators with an Ethernet switching element on-chip that eliminates the need for an external and costly switching device, explains Texas Instruments.  

“By combining the TCI6631K2L with an analog front end transceiver, the AFE7500] which is a state-of-the-art integrated RF-to-bits SoC targeted towards high-performance general purpose radio applications], TI has developed a unique two-chip solution that can meet the breadth of spectrum and diversity of protocols in use today, including NLoS, TV white space, LTE relay backhaul and emerging shared spectrum bands,” says the post.