Mindspeed Technologies (News - Alert), a specialist in providing system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for small cells, unveiled the third generation of its Transcede family of baseband processors. The Mindspeed small cell SoC portfolio encompasses residential femtocells as well as enterprise picocells and metrocells.

Dr. Naser Adas, senior vice president and general manager of the wireless infrastructure business unit at Mindspeed, said, “Once more, we have demonstrated Mindspeed’s small cell SoC leadership. Our small cell product line now spans from very cost-effective residential to high-performing public access metro-class base stations.”

The new T4400 baseband processors serve higher capacity metrocell class small cells, while the T3400 suits the needs of premium enterprise and lower performance metrocells. The T4400 and T3400 will sample in the fourth calendar quarter of 2013.

According to officials, the new products feature dual-mode capability, and can therefore use the older Picochip technology as well. They support 3GPP Release 10 (LTE (News - Alert)-A) and will be able to support Release 12 (LTE-B) also soon.

The Transcede family of devices is based on industry-standard cores and they integrate CEVA XC4000 DSP cores, multiple clusters of ARM (News - Alert) Cortex A15 processors with symmetric multi-processing (SMP), along with hardware accelerators and co-processors.

The third-generation Transcede maintains software compatibility with previous versions, enabling the products to use the Mindspeed internally developed PHY and partner-developed stack-software.

This in turn helps reduce system development time and technology risk, and helps launch new small cell deployments more easily. Mindspeed’s scalable, software-compatible architecture also helps developers to leverage value-added software so they can deliver differentiated products to the market.

“Today our products are shipping to carriers for HSPA+, TD-SCDMA, LTE FDD and TD-LTE. With the new products, we will also enable small cells with LTE-A and a roadmap to LTE-B / LTE-HI,” added Dr. Adas.

CEVA, Inc., a licensor of silicon intellectual property (SIP) platform solutions and DSP cores, announced an extension to its strategic relationship with Mindspeed, with a Mindspeed license for the CEVA (News - Alert)-XC4000 DSP for use in their next-generation LTE-Advanced multi-mode small cell Transcede SoCs.

Mindspeed licensed and deployed the CEVA-X and CEVA-XC DSPs in its previous-generation LTE SoCs, now in mass deployment with multiple operators.