Interoperability of Tundra’s Scalable Serial RapidIO Switch with TIs New High Performance DSP is announced

Using the Tundra Tsi578 Serial RapidIO development platform, Tundra and Texas Instruments recently completed interoperability testing. The successful tests prove that Tundra’s third generation Serial RapidIO switch, with multi-cast capability, and Texas Instrument’s 3-core, 3GHz DSPs can be deployed to develop DSP clusters, aggregated with Serial RapidIO switching. This combination is ideally suited for high data intensive applications such as WiMAX, 3G, LTE, TD-SCDMA and WiBRO. These types of applications require multiple DSPs on a single channel card and the Tsi578 switch is uniquely suited to interconnect the high bandwidth-capable DSPs. Delivering this combined solution will enable base station manufacturers to achieve optimal performance of their platform while spanning a wide range of air interfaces.

“Some of our wireless infrastructure customers have begun designing this high performance combination of industry-leading products, thereby enabling their next-generation RapidIO-based systems to meet the OFDM processing and Turbo Decode requirements,” said Daniel Hoste, President and Chief Executive Officer at Tundra. “The Tundra/TI solution offers the power and configurability that designers of embedded solutions need to build reliable, high performance RapidIO-based systems for a wide range of scalable and high bandwidth applications”.

The TCI6487 and TCI6488 DSPs deliver maximum performance with a significantly reduced bill of materials,” said Travis Scheckel, TI’s RapidIO Development Manager and Chair of the RapidIO Technical Working Group. “Interoperability testing such as this effort gives base station manufacturers a measure of confidence that their solution will meet the carriers’ needs in a timely fashion, while delivering higher performance, greater scalability and low power.”

Texas Instruments announced availability of the TCI6487 in December 2006, the newest 3GHz-performing wireless infrastructure baseband product that boosts applications for GSM-based base stations while addressing new markets and requirements for WiMAX and TD-SCDMA. TI also announced the availability of TCI6488 in February 2007 for the WCDMA market, integrating a Receiver Accelerator Co-Processor. Both products support three cores running at 1GHz each. The TCI6487 and TCI6488 processors enable base station manufacturers to extend their existing designs while entering into new markets, requiring small form factor applications with an exceptional scaleable, flexible solution.


In February 2006, Tundra launched the Tsi578 Serial RapidIO Switch with multicast capability, responding to designers’ requirement for low interconnect processing overhead, lowest power consumption, minimum latency as well as board layout with high signal integrity. The Tsi578 supports the 1.3 RapidIO specification, and its broad feature set includes; field proven port flexibility which supports mixed port widths at up to 10 Gbps data speeds, hardware multicast, supervised traffic flow for increased performance and fabric management, and enhanced SerDes for the lowest power switch solution available in the market today.