Cavium Announces Availability of Complete TD-LTE Support for OCTEON Fusion® Small Cell Base Station Processors

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 8, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Cavium, Inc., (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, wired and wireless networking, today announced a software stack update that adds support for TD-LTE on its OCTEON Fusion family of SoCs (System-on-Chip). Cavium's TD-LTE software stack option allows small cell manufacturers to deliver both FDD and TDD-enabled products using the same OCTEON Fusion processors.

Operators in China and India, homes to over 2 billion potential mobile data consumers, use TDD spectrum extensively and are preparing to introduce large scale TD-LTE deployments over the next 1 to 2 years.  Operators in other global markets, where TDD makes up a significant percentage of their LTE spectrum, also have announced plans to add TD-LTE services. 

Cavium is unique in offering feature-rich small cell solutions which include manufacturable hardware designs and fully integrated PHY, L2/L3 stack and management software, enabling manufacturers to quickly bring commercial base station products to market.  The OCTEON Fusion TD-LTE stack enhancement initially targets 3GPP Release 9, supports up to 128 simultaneous users and 20MHz channel bandwidth. This functionality aligns with the requirements specified for the dense urban deployment market segment.

Caroline Gabriel, Research Director, Maravedis-Rethink commented, "Two important trends in wireless infrastructure have now become main stream: the adoption of small cells as a fundamental part of the radio access network (RAN), and the realization that TDD is a critical part of carrier deployments.  This announcement helps fill an important need.  The availability of SoCs and reference designs are an important sign that the TD-LTE ecosystem is catching up with its FDD sibling. This is significant to all carriers who are looking to make the best use of their expensive spectrum. This includes operators with TDD only, such as China Mobile; those with both TDD and FDD, such as Vodafone and BT; and those with legacy WiMAX spectrum such as Clearwire – now Softbank."

"We have a very complete small cell offering, with chip, software stacks and reference designs that now support 100% of the LTE market," said Raj Singh, General Manager of Cavium's Wireless Broadband Group. "Operators are seeking fully integrated solutions that can serve high user counts while reducing deployment costs.  Those carriers with TDD-only spectrum, or looking to add TDD spectrum to their FDD-based offerings, now have the ability to select a high-performance small cell option based on OCTEON Fusion processors."

Spectrum regulators around the world have assigned capacity to TD-LTE, including 50MHz in recent European auctions. In many cases this is re-farming the spectrum that was to be used by WiMAX. Because spectrum is expensive and crowded, this "vacant prime real estate" is a major asset for carriers. TD-LTE has largely been supported by traditional macro cell products until now.  The contemporary architecture of small cells, delivering better network efficiency and making best use of spectrum, had not been widely available for TDD.

At the Mobile World Congress conference in February, Cavium announced UniFiRAN, an end-to-end software solution that will enable a seamless RAN (Radio Access Network) architecture in 3G and 4G networks.  The scalable software running on Cavium's OCTEON and OCTEON Fusion processors allows a unified set of applications to run across platforms ranging from 3G/4G small cells to micro and macro cells, to Cloud RAN configurations.

About Cavium, Inc.
Cavium is a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing in networking, communications and the digital home. Cavium offers a broad portfolio of integrated, software compatible processors ranging in performance from 100 Mbps to over 100 Gbps that enable secure, intelligent functionality in enterprise, data-center, broadband/consumer and access & service provider equipment. Cavium's processors are supported by ecosystem partners that provide operating systems, tool support, reference designs and other services. Cavium's principal offices are in San Jose, California with design team locations in California, Massachusetts, India and China. For more information, please visit: http://www.cavium.com.

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SOURCE Cavium, Inc.