Texas Instruments Collaborates with AirHop Communications

Texas Instruments Incorporated, a provider of semiconductor technologies, announced its collaboration with AirHop (News - Alert) Communications, a provider of advanced radio access network intelligence solutions for heterogeneous networks (HetNet).

The collaboration is aimed at integrating AirHop's eSON advanced self-organizing network software on TI's KeyStone-based small cell System-on-Chips. As planned, AirHop's SON software support will be made available for TI's KeyStone-based small cell solutions in the second half of 2012.

"The management, configuration of and interference cancellation between macro cells and small cells is one of the largest barriers to mass deployment of small cells today," Sameer Wasson, business manager, wireless base station infrastructure, TI said in a press release.

"TI's small cell SoCs are in production and in development with leading base station vendors today, and with this integration of AirHop's SON software, we can truly enable operators to overcome some of the early challenges of HetNet deployments and advance the installation of small cells," Wasson added.

With this integrated solution, developers using TI's TMS320TCI6612, TMS320TCI6614 and TMS320TCI6636 SoCs will now be able to design small cell base stations that will facilitate operators' ability to deploy heterogeneous networks.

TI's scalable KeyStone architecture includes support for both TMS320C66x digital signal processor generation cores and multiple cache coherent quad ARM (News - Alert) Cortex-A15 clusters, for a mixture of up to 32 DSP and RISC cores. In addition, TI's KeyStone architecture includes fully offloaded, flexible packet and security coprocessors and capacity expansion for SoC structural elements such as TeraNet, Multicore Navigator and Multicore Shared Memory Controller. These structural elements allow base stations developers to fully utilize the capability of all processing elements, including the cores and enhanced AccelerationPacs.

AirHop's eSON software delivers multi-cell coordination and optimization that can be deployed in fully distributed, centralized or hybrid architectures and, for maximum flexibility, can be located anywhere in the core network cloud and on a variety of network edge devices.

The combined TI and AirHop solution is believed to help base station vendors get to market quickly with high performance small cells that satisfy telecom operators' requirements for HetNet applications.

"AirHop is a technology leader in helping carriers and equipment vendors use SON to optimize capacity and manage the interferences in small cell deployment, making us a natural choice to work with TI on its LTE (News - Alert) small cell SoCs, which are the most competitive in the industry," Yan Hui, co-founder and chief executive officer of AirHop said in a statement.

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