Date: 25/10/2011

Cavium unveiled small cell base station chip OCTEON Fusion

Cavium, Inc. has unveiled the OCTEON Fusion Family, small cell "Base Station-on-a-chip" family specifically designed for LTE & 3G small cell base stations, including picocell and micro base stations. OCTEON Fusion processors combine MIPS64 based multi-core architecture along with purpose-built Baseband DSP cores, extensive LTE/3G hardware accelerators and digital front end (DFE) functionality into a single chip. This product family consists of multiple SoCs (system-on-a-chip) that enable small cells ranging from 32 users to 300+ users and up to dual 20MHz carriers.

Cavium quotes according to industry analysts; the small cell base station semiconductor market is expected to reach over $1 Billion by 2016.

The OCTEON Fusion processors combines 2x to 6x 64 bit cnMIPS cores operating at up to 2GHz with up to 8x baseband DSP's operating up to 1GHz. The OCTEON Fusion family consists of two software compatible product lines: CNF71XX, CNF72XX.

OCTEON Fusion is offered with FusionStack, comprehensive software to support to quick development.
First samples of CNF71XX and the FusionStack software will be available in Q1, 2012; the CNF72XX will be available subsequently.