WAYNE, N.J. — Texas Instruments Inc. is looking to make voice-over-Internet Protocol capabilities a reality in lower-end residential and SoHo gateway and router designs with the release this week of the TNETV1060 VoIP gateway chip. As broadband gateways continue to penetrate the home and small-office, home-office environments, carriers are starting to eye these systems as a platform for also delivering voice services. This is especially true in Asian countries where a switch to VoIP technology can lower end user costs.
The TNETV1060 provides a platform for embedding VoIP into gateway architectures. The chip combines TI's TMS320C55x digital signal processor core with a MIPS 4KEc Emerald 32-bit RISC core. The MIPS processor operates at 165 MHz and provides performance of up to 233 Dhrystone Mips. To complement this processor, TI has also included 16 kbytes of both instruction and data cache memory on-chip.
The DSP core operates at 125 MHz and delivers up to 250 Mips. The DSP subsystem includes 12 kwords of instruction cache, 64 kwords of RAM and an interrupt handler. "The speed and cache provided make this DSP more suited for voice applications," said product management director Debbie Greenstreet.
To make the TNETV1060 applicable to gateway designs, TI has integrated two on-board 10/100Base-T Ethernet media-access control/physical-layer ports as well as a three-port Layer 2 Ethernet switch. The chip also includes a TDM interface for linking with codecs, a serial peripheral interface and a proprietary five-pin VLYNQ interface for connecting to security engines or the company's wireless-LAN chip set.
TI is including its Telogy software stack with the TNETV1060. The software delivers echo cancellation, adaptive jitter buffering, tone detection and vocoders. It supports Wind River's VxWorks operating system and MontaVista Software's Linux OS.
Built in a 0.13-micron process, the TNETV1060 consumes 1.8 watts during operation. The chip is sampling now, with volume production slated for late in the fourth quarter. It is priced at $15 each in lots of 10,000 for a chip supporting four channels of voice.
