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TI Delivers Industry's First Standard-Independent Single-Chip Digital Baseband for Wireless SystemDesign Platform Combines TI DSP Core with Low-Power ARM CoreDALLAS (Oct. 28, 1996) -- A new single-chip digital signal processing (DSP) solution that integrates all the digital baseband functions necessary for the design of digital wireless telephones using any transmission standard in the world was announced today by Texas Instruments (TI). The standard-independent TI digital baseband platform helps manufacturers reduce the size, weight, component costs and power consumption in digital cellular phones, digital cordless phones, two-way voice/data pagers and other types of wireless communications systems. TI has been delivering customized samples to selected customers for the last several months."This digital baseband platform reflects the strength the TI Wireless Communications Business Unit has in offering complete DSP Solutions for this market," said Gilles Delfassy, TI Semiconductor Group vice president and worldwide general manager for the Wireless Communications Business Unit. "During 1996, TI expects to have its wireless-optimized DSP solutions incorporated into approximately 22 million cellular digital phones worldwide. This represents more than half of the digital cellular phones manufactured in 1996. TI is the world's leading DSP provider.* " At the heart of the TI digital baseband platform is a high performance, low power processing engine-the TMS320C54x digital signal processor (DSP) core. This DSP core specializes in wireless communications high-speed number-crunching functions such as voice coding, channel coding, error correction, equalization, demodulation and encryption. This DSP optimization makes the core approximately 30 percent more MIPS-efficient than comparable DSPs. A 16-bit/32-bit c470 microcontroller core based on the ARM7TDMI (Thumb) core licensed from Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. (ARM) handles more general system control, such as mobility management and the man machine interface. Since the DSP, the microcontroller cores and the logic gates can be programmed to support any digital wireless standard, the TI digital baseband platform can be used to design systems in any region of the world. In order to accelerate customer time-to-market, TI also has a library of various DSP and MCU software modules, as well as ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) hardware peripherals that can be licensed to customers to support various worldwide standards. The TI digital baseband platform is supported by TI's 0.25-micron TSC5000 CMOS standard cell ASIC library. This flexible design methodology enables system designers to integrate additional logic functions, RAM and ROM memories and mixed-signal functions such as phase-locked loops and analog-to-digital converters. At this node, the platform allows sub-2V operation, thereby reducing the power consumption by half as compared with a conventional 2.7V system. All of these functions are necessary in wireless digital phones, but they are configured differently for different standards and other system requirements. The TI digital baseband platform will be ported in 1997 to the 0.18-micron TSC6000 library which is based on TI's 125-million-transistor TImeline technology. This will enable 1V functionality which reduces the power consumption by another 75 percent. The announcement of the TI digital baseband platform follows an extensive period of customer testing. Nokia, Europe's largest manufacturer of cellular phones, for example, has been receiving samples of a device based on this platform. "This integrated digital baseband platform will support increased functionality and performance while reducing system cost and power dissipation of our digital cellular programs," said Yrjö Neuvo, Senior vice president, R&D, Nokia. The two core processors in the TI digital baseband platform have been selected for their suitability in wireless communications systems which demand high performance, low cost and low power dissipation. Both cores are supported by extensive suites of TI development tools and are accessible for in-circuit emulation (ICE) through an IEEE 1149.1/JTAG test port. Special on-chip logic allows simultaneous co-emulation of both cores with a single set of emulation hardware. This unique, proprietary co-emulation capability can save designers months of development time, speeding time-to-market.The TMS320C54x DSP core features include a Viterbi accelerator, four internal buses and dual address generators to enable multiple operand operations, a 40-bit adder and two 40-bit accumulators to facilitate parallelism, single-cycle normalization and exponential encoding, and single-cycle instructions including 17-bit unsigned multiplication. In the TSC5000 ASIC backplane, the TMS320C54x core operates at 100 MIPS at 2.5V. The accompanying power dissipation is 0.59 mA/MHz. These features, and others including power down modes, make the TMS320C54x DSP core well-suited for digital wireless systems. The c470 ARM7TDMI (Thumb) microcontroller core can operate in two modes with 75 MHz of performance: 32-bit instructions for faster execution and 16-bit instructions for high code density. The 16-bit capability saves a remarkable amount of memory space and could result in a reduction of the customer's system costs. The microcontroller is also extremely thrifty in terms of cost and power dissipation. The 0.25-micron version, compatible with the TSC5000 ASIC library and operating at 2.5V, is only 2.0 square millimeters on the die (about one-third the size of similar cores) and dissipates only 0.36 mA/MHz. "With this proven platform, designers have the capability to integrate and customize the entire digital baseband section of their systems on a single chip while also addressing any transmission standard," Delfassy concludes. "This capability not only gives designers flexibility, it also helps them speed up the design cycle." The TI digital baseband platform is ready for current engagements from Texas Instruments for use in high-volume digital wireless communications designs. Non-recurring engineering costs and pricing varies based on each customer's specific design configuration.
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