CommAgility AdvancedMC modules harness the performance of Texas Instruments' new multicore DSP and SoC base station

The AMC-2C6616 incorporates TI’s new CI6616 SoC base station, and is targeted at LTE wireless base station applications, including development, trials and final deployment in the field.

The second module, the AMC-2C6670, is based on TI’s C6670 DSP, and is designed for high-performance applications in the mission critical, including public safety and defense, medical and high-end imaging and test and automation and other multicore high performance applications.

Both devices, announced today, are based on TI’s new KeyStone multicore architecture, and provide major improvements in performance for LTE and other high end applications. Each device has four TMS320C66x advanced processing cores with fixed and floating point capability, giving up to over 150 GMACS and over 75 GFLOPs on a single device. The C66x DSPs have a range of targeted co-processors and high-speed I/O including PCIExpress v2, SRIO Generation 2, Gigabit Ethernet, Antenna Interfaces and the Hyperlink processor extension bus, which are all used effectively in CommAgility products.

Manish Patel, marketing manager, TI, said, “With CommAgility supporting the AdvancedMC form factor, TI and CommAgility are empowering customers with an advanced, OEM-ready product based on our new SoC base station and DSPs.”

Edward Young, managing director at CommAgility, said, “CommAgility has a reputation for successfully delivering dense, high performance signal processing products in the AdvancedMC form factor. With these new TI C66x DSPs, we are able to deliver an industry-leading powerful and flexible processing platform for wireless baseband and other performance-hungry applications.”

Mrinmoy Purkayastha, global sales head, communications business unit at Tata Elxsi, said, “The new modules from CommAgility will allow us to quickly extend our integrated LTE eNodeB solutions on the new TI C66x DSP generation, and provide customers with a scalable LTE solution - from micro to multi-sector macro base stations. Our continued partnership will enable early development and time-to-market for product companies, OEMs and ODMs.”

A variety of high speed I/O options are provided on both modules. Serial RapidIO (SRIO) V2.1 at speeds of up to 20Gbps per port is supported by an IDT CPS-1848 SRIO switch and the modules include Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

As standard, AMC-2C6616 and AMC-2C6670 provide three front panel SFP+ optical interfaces that offer flexible high-speed links, and are configurable as CPRI, OBSAI, Gigabit Ethernet, SRIO or other standards. Alternatively, dual mini-SAS connectors to the SRIO switch and the FPGA’s GTX ports offer up to 40Gbps of front panel I/O.

The new AMCs include up to 2Gbyte of 64-bit wide DDR3-1600 SDRAM for each DSP. The FPGA has two banks of DDR3 SDRAM: 512Mbytes of 32-bit wide and 256Mbytes of 16-bit wide memory. 128Mbytes of Flash memory is also provided for non-volatile storage of multiple FPGA configurations and DSP and FPGA software. CommAgility glue logic provides board control and FPGA configuration via local SPI interfaces or over SRIO, leaving the main FPGA completely free for customer application code. Full Board Support Libraries are also provided to speed customer application development.

Timing and synchronisation is achieved via front panel SMB or backplane clock I/O. Optionally a GPS module can be fitted, in which case no additional timing equipment is required, significantly reducing systems complexity.