Freescale Semiconductor raised a few eyebrows this week with its latest StarCore DSP, which is a six-core device aimed squarely at next generation wireless basestation designs.
The interest in the MSC8156, which is the company’s first programmable DSP device fabbed on a 45nm process, is that it is attacking the strong position Texas Instruments has in the basestation market with its TMS320TCI6487 processor.
The TI processor was introduced in 2006 and is established in GSM and China TD-SCDMA-based basestation designs, but its three cores each run at 1GHz.
The new Freescale chip on paper effectively doubles that peak performance, which is likely to be a factor as developers move to next generation LTE basestation designs with their higher data rates generated by multi-channel radio schemes such as orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) and multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO).
Source:electronicsweekly
