TI Korea (CEO Kent Jeon, www.ti.com/ww/kr ) February 28, 2014 – TI (CEO Kent Jeon) announced that it has developed the industry's first single-board end-to-end (ENET to RF) solution platform suitable for enterprise and pico small cell base stations in collaboration with PureWave Networks Inc., a provider of cost-effective, advanced wireless base stations. Leveraging TI's highly integrated KeyStone™-based TCI6630K2L System-on-Chip (SoC), the Hercules solution platform combines TI's analog front-end transceiver AFE7500 to enable customers to rapidly evaluate 4G cellular capabilities and performance "out-of-the-box." This innovative platform is optimized for mass production, providing BOM, schematic, and layout files as hardware reference designs to help developers accelerate time-to-market. Customers can use a complete programmable solution to customize for enterprise PoE+ (Power over Ethernet) applications and pico outdoor applications, and integrate 802.11ac/n Wi-Fi.

Cal Parsons, Marketing Manager for Small Cell Processors at TI, said, “Together with PureWave, TI is now able to provide the most robust and outstanding comprehensive demo, evaluation, and development solutions on the market for small cell manufacturer customers,” adding, “Through our collaboration with PureWave, we are able to provide system-level solutions that accelerate time-to-market and enable manufacturers to develop differentiated enterprise and pico small cells on a single platform.”

Dan Picker, CTO of PureWave Networks, said, “PureWave’s goal with the Hercules small cell solution platform is to go beyond simply providing the foundation for PureWave’s next-generation small cell platform to acting as a catalyst for the rapid expansion of high-performance small cell base stations into 4G networks worldwide. By combining TI’s highly integrated and innovative new chipsets with a scalable modular design, we have been able to provide a groundbreaking platform that achieves outstanding performance and flexibility.”

The Hercules solution platform can support 32 to 128 concurrent users simultaneously using LTE FDD and TDD, LTE Release 10 with in-band and inter-band carrier aggregation, WCDMA, triple mode, and 4x4 MIMO (multiple input multiple output) by utilizing the digital radio front end integrated in the TCI6630K2L SoC and two AFE7500 RFICs. Hercules is a platform designed to be optimized for mass production, while also enabling customization such as expansion via PCIe/SGMII ports to implement developer-selected WiFi solutions or POE.

This platform is a mass-production small cell PHY (Physical) software package that includes the industry's highest-performing and most robust LTE PHY, as well as TI's high-performance base station software pack (SoftwarePac) and PureWave application software. By utilizing this comprehensive software architecture, customers can save time, resources, and budget, and allocate these saved resources to differentiating small cell products according to the needs of different network operators.

In addition, Quantenna Communications has developed an 802.11ac Wi-Fi expansion card that enables the development of Wi-Fi+LTE solutions achieving the highest performance with the industry's smallest BOM by connecting to the TCI6630K2L SoC via ENET (SGMII) in conjunction with the Hercules solution platform. Quantenna's unique Wi-Fi architecture provides the performance required for indoor and outdoor small cells using 802.11ac and 802.11n dual solutions, and allows the ARM® Cortex-A15 CPU core to be completely relieved of the workload by utilizing the network coprocessor integrated in the TCI6630K2L.

Lionel Bonnot, Senior Director of Business Development at Quantenna Communications, said, “We are pleased that Quantenna’s latest 802.11ac 4x4 Wi-Fi chipset is being used with TI’s new small cell platform. This enables the effective utilization of Quantenna’s industry-leading performance and coverage in indoor and outdoor Wi-Fi-enabled small cells.”