Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) has come out with a new family of chipsets for use in xDSL residential gateways. The UR8 chipsets are of importance to service providers, said TI’s Tina Rogers, because they have a multimedia processor that can support the heavy processing demands of IPTV; offer a high level of DSL interoperability due to the company’s success in the DSL chipset marketplace; and support high-quality VoIP, which has become a key driver for broadband access.
“The quality of TI’s voice is best in industry – we have over 200 million ports shipped in networks today,” said Rogers, who is TI’s manager of product line management. She added that the company’s Piqua QoS technology, in which TI has made a big investment, can be found in the UR8 gear and enables remote monitoring and configuration, as well as discovery, to lower service provider opex. She added that TI is also working with network management system vendors to incorporate their features into its chipsets.
The UR8 architecture comprises an advanced multimedia gateway processor, a programmable DSL PHY, a high-performance DSP-based voice sub-system and a rich set of LAN interfaces, according to TI. The highly integrated chipsets, which are sampling today, come in five varieties, two of which support both ADSL2+ and VDSL2, and the other three of which do ADSL2+ only.
TI would not say what turnkey equipment vendors will be using the UR8, adding that those vendors will be making their own announcements about products using the new chipsets shortly, but customers of TI’s existing AR7 chipsets include Actiontec Electronics Inc., Netopia Inc., Siemens AG, Westell Technologies Inc. and others.
Texas Instruments Inc. www.ti.com
