Texas Instruments Develops Innovative Technology to Speed-Up Internet Access
New ADSL products will deliver unprecedented levels of networking performance and flexibility for consumers and service providers
DALLAS (Jan. 27, 1998) -- Texas Instruments (TI) (NYSE: TXN) has announced the development of breakthrough chipset technology to give Internet users in homes and businesses the high access speeds necessary for more enjoyable and productive networking. The new chipset is for Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) technology, a digital communications service that delivers significantly higher speeds over ordinary telephone lines than today's analog modems. With 45 percent market share in 1996 according to Forward Concepts, TI is the worldwide-market leader in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) -- a specialized number-crunching technology. TI's DSP market leadership and industry-leading ADSL Discrete Multi-Tone (DMT) technology (developed by Amati Communications), will result in a chipset that enables equipment vendors to develop high-performance ADSL products.
"TI's development of ADSL solutions will assure that consumers and service providers can bridge the gap between today's 56K modems and megabits-per-second digital access to the Internet," said Greg Waters, Director of Network Access Products in the Semiconductor Group at TI. "TI is the only semiconductor vendor to offer a fully-programmable DSP-based solution. Programmability enables easy network access flexibility for new features, scalability for growth, and extensibility to new applications. And as network standards evolve, TI's programmable DSP technologies will enable users to keep pace simply by downloading software upgrades over the network instead of replacing equipment, as is the case today."
Market Potential
ADSL is one of several types of DSL services currently being developed by vendors in the semiconductor and networking industries. All of these services run over the ordinary telephone lines installed in homes and businesses. The market potential for DSL products is huge, with more than 790 million analog lines installed worldwide today according to McKinsey and Company. Because DSL service delivery requires an access product at both the subscriber and service provider end of each line, the potential market opportunity is over 1.6 billion DSL devices -- all requiring chipsets from vendors such as TI. This market will continue to grow as the number of telephone lines installed continues to increase. "By year-end 1998, most network equipment manufacturers and service providers will make their key technical and architectural decisions for implementing the various types of DSL services," said Waters. "DSL technology uses approximately 100 times the DSP processing power compared to analog modems, meaning that DSL vendors will gain tremendous benefit from using the unparalleled performance of TI's TMS320C6x DSPs, ADSL technology, and precision mixed-signal components."
TI Product Leadership in Network Access
TI offers an attractive solution for ADSL because it holds the #1 market position in DSP, is #1 in the mixed-signal Integrated Circuit (IC) portion of the analog market according to Dataquest 1996 figures, and has sold 40.6 million DSP modem chipsets to date. The high-performance DMT technology for ADSL was developed by Amati Communications, recently acquired by TI. Amati has been a pioneer and world leader in ADSL development, and a significant contributor to American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and International Telecommunications Union (ITU) standards. The combination of TI and Amati has created the industry's largest DSL engineering team with extensive experience in field trials around the world that have proven the operation and performance of ADSL.
ADSL: High-Speed Networking Over Ordinary Phone Lines
ADSL is a digital networking technology, offered by telephone companies and other service providers, that enables users to enjoy high-speed data communications over ordinary telephone lines. Because ADSL supports higher downstream (from the network to the user) than upstream (from the user to the network) speeds, it is ideally suited for Internet access. Accessing an ADSL service requires a compatible modem in the user's PC, and equipment in the service provider's central office that integrates access from multiple ADSL service subscribers.
A variety of interactive, value-added applications can be enhanced by Internet access over ADSL, including the following:
- Voice calls over the Internet
- Real-time streaming data and video feeds
- Multimedia-rich Web experiences
- Distance learning via interactive data, video, and multimedia
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