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Wednesday, November 17, 2010

#WIRELESS: "Freescale Basestation DSP Tops TI's"

Texas Instruments is the top-shelf supplier of digital-signal processors for the wireless basestations that carriers use to communicate with cell phones, but now Freescale is challenging with unique architectural features in its new basestation DSPs. Look for Freescale and TI to wage a specs-man-ship rivalry well into the coming decade. R. Colin Johnson, Kyoto Prize Fellow @NextGenLog

Freescale's new basestation DSP aims to ease transition from 3G to 4G with application-specific hardware units.
Here is what my story in EETimes says about DSPs for basestations: Freescale Semiconductor Inc. appeared to one-up Texas Instruments Inc. Wednesday (Nov. 17) by rolling out a digital signal processor (DSP) core that achieved a higher rating from benchmarking consulting firm BDTI Inc. Last week, TI reported that its C66x DSP core achieved a BDTImark2000 score of 16,690. Freescale countered Wednesday that its new redesigned SC3850 core achieves a BDTIsimMark2000 score of 18,500. As network operators convert from 3G to 4G, the system-on-chip (SoC) DSPs that execute the increasingly complex air-interface protocols—from LTE to WiMAX to WCDMA and HSPA+—are waging a benchmark war...
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