networkZONE Products for the week of September 22, 2003
Texas Instruments Says . . .
VoN Tinker Toy -- TI's Integrated, Scalable System-on-a-Chip
Provides Flexible Architecture for VoIP Customer Premise Gateways
Newest Solution Enables Manufacturers to Expand and Differentiate
Products Across Multiple VoIP Gateway Segments
Texas Instruments Incorporated has announced its newest Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateway solution, a highly integrated software and silicon system-on-a-chip based on TI's digital signal processing (DSP) technology and award-winning Telogy Software. Designed to address the requirements of residential and small office/home office (SOHO) gateways, TI's solution features unique expansion capabilities that enable customers to scale their gateway products to larger business applications requiring additional channels of voice. With the addition of this robust, expandable product, TI enhances its leadership in the VoIP gateway market, offering a complete suite of solutions for high density, small to medium enterprise (SME) and residential and SOHO gateway applications.
TI's TNETV1060, based on the TMS320C55x DSP and an enhanced high-speed MIPS32 RISC core, delivers high-performance voice processing and data routing functions for manufacturers of integrated voice/data gateways, leveraging TI's investment in communication processors for VoIP applications. By integrating key solution elements onto the chip, such as Ethernet MACs and PHYs for high-speed data routing, TI reduces the solution's bill of materials cost and component count, affording greater cost savings to gateway manufacturers. The solution also employs low-cost external SDRAM, allowing scaling of features and applications to support specific market requirements while minimizing costs.
"TI has again leveraged its history and expertise in the VoIP market, adding this highly integrated CPE gateway platform to its broad portfolio of solutions, said Will Strauss, founder and president of Forward Concepts. "With its impressive scalability and expansion capabilities, the TNETV1060 will quickly enable OEMs to extend their market reach and offer a variety of VoIP gateway devices at a range of channel density points."
Using TI's flexible VLYNQ chip-to-chip serial interface, gateway manufacturers will also be able to expand the number of voice channels in their equipment. This is accomplished by connecting the TNETV1060, via VLYNQ, to TI's TNETV941, a DSP specifically designed for VoIP applications. This revolutionary new feature extends the scalability of voice channels in any given CPE gateway device, enabling OEMs and ODMs to serve the needs of residential, SOHO and small business gateway markets with one common platform.
Using VLYNQ, VoIP gateway manufacturers can also map additional functionality into their products either at the time of their design, or later, as demand for a feature or application emerges. Manufacturers can add on-board co-processors and peripherals that support features such as wireless and security applications, thus transforming their products into smart gateway devices.
"The rollout of the TNETV1060 reaffirms our commitment to continually deliver comprehensive VoIP solutions to our customers, supporting the broadest range of functionality for residential, SOHO and SME applications," said Fred Zimmerman, executive director, customer premise solutions, TI's VoIP Business Unit. "Since many of our customers' products will be incorporated in residential applications where users connect their home networks through gateways and broadband modems, we recognized the importance of including high performance data routing to our voice solution, at cost-effective price points, which is a key area of differentiation for TI's products."
A complete software and silicon solution, the TNETV1060 platform incorporates TI´s field-proven Telogy Software, which includes pre-integrated industry operating systems and protocol stacks, such as H.323 and session initiation protocol (SIP). This pre-integration decreases the investment manufacturers must make in order to offer standard features on their products and enables them to focus time on developing high-end, revenue-generating applications. Toll quality voice is achieved through a full implementation of features that include echo cancellation, voice playout software with adaptive jitter buffering, tone detection/generation, voice activity detection, and low-bit rate and/or PCM vocoders.
TI, which has been supplying solutions to the IP telephony industry since
its inception, is the leading provider of VoIP solutions. Approximately
80 percent of the VoIP gateway and IP phone products in use or in development
today are based on TI technology.
analogZONE Says . . .
TI's release of its latest residential VoIP gateway chip is well-timed to take advantage of a potentially explosive market. The VoIP market is already a hot market in Korea and Japan, with China following, but may accelerate in North America as services like Vonage that deliver low-cost very flexible heavily-featured services that POTS can't begin to offer. This surge in demand has brought the unit production volumes of the equipment to the point where it's finally cost-effective to replace stand-alone generic DSPs and support chips with a more integrated solution.
Today's announcement for the TNETV1060 focuses on SoHo and residential products. It's a complete residential gateway on a chip, that allows designers to add up to four lines of derived IP voice and fax service from a DSL, cable, or other broadband connection. As is the style these days, the chip set comes with a full complement of software reference designs to speed development along.
TI seems to have done a good job in leveraging its expertise in VoIP, DSPs, and producing big-ass SoCs to ride the cost curve on CPE downward. They've integrated everything that makes sense at this point in the market's maturity level by shoehorning all the voice processing functions and support for data routing functions, plus a bunch of handy I/O on one chip, while leaving the analog-oriented functions to an external codec IC. Most of the processing is done on the digital chip's two CPUs - a C55 DSP and a 165 MHz , 32-bit MIPS "Emerald" RISC core.
This dual-CPU arrangement allows a logical division of labor where the MIPS core handles VoIP and telephony protocols plus configuration and management of the chip's embedded 3-port switch. The 10/100 switch handles a lot of the layer-2 functions without loading the processor, but does rely on it for some exception processing and address resolution. A pair of on-chip PHYs allows the switch to hook up to a PC and a modem (or other CPE) with only the addition of magnetics and a connector. The third port connects to the MIPS core.
The DSP handles all the audio processing functionality including compression EC tone detection & generation packet playout buffering, fax processing, and comfort noise generation. It has a TDM interface that connects to an external codec/LIU, and then to a standard analog phone. Like its companion RISC core, the C55 runs under Telogy's VoIP software suite, which currently supports SIP, MGCP and H.323 protocols. And thanks to its programmable architecture and expansion capabilities, products using the TNETV1060 will be able to easily adapt to changing standards, new features, and new networking technologies.
One clever cost-cutting feature is that TI employs a cycle-sharing scheme to allow a single external SDRAM to be shared between the DSP and RISC cores for both program and data. TI claims that the SDRAM is fast enough that this clever little cheat is transparent to the operation and does not affect performance. If this is true, designers can realize significant cost (and board space) savings, by sizing a single memory to match the needs of both applications with significantly less waste.
While the device is intended mostly for stand-alone applications, it does have significant expansion capabilities via the proprietary 5-pin VLYNQ port that is found on all TI broadband devices in production. It allows for reasonably high-speed serial data transfer (125 Mbit/s, full duplex) between any product in the TI line, providing a plug-and-play pipeline to add more voice ports, a WLAN interface, or a security processor. You can even daisy-chain multiple processors on the same VLYNQ. Of course, since it's a proprietary interface, it tends to lock customers into the TI architecture. But if you really need to add some non-TI silicon to your design, you can go through a VLINQ-to-PCI bridge to use other vendor's solutions. The VLINQ logic is also available for customer license to use in an FPGA or ASIC.
Most new products are moving to SIP as it evolves to support telco features and functions, but TI's support of H.323 and MGCP will allow its use in many other existing systems. As usual, TI is supporting developers with a nice family of demo and evaluation hardware platforms that assist you with early validation of the technology and to facilitate quick development. They should also be pretty handy teaching tools to help novice engineers explore the subtleties of VoIP protocols.
This part is a natural for the growing number of CPE boxes that are being used to deliver VoIP services to residential and SoHo customers. Its processing power and flexibility will help it retain sockets as the market matures, and the stand-alone VoN adapter terminal adapter gets integrated with a router function in a single box.
The TNETV1060 is in production with pricing at $18 for 10-k piece lots in standard configurations including four channels of voice. Pricing will vary based on software configuration. Software development platform, reference design, and VoIP software are also available.
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