Unstrung reports that chip vendor Texas Instruments (TI) has marked its official entry into the femtocell market via the launch of a new Digital Signal Processor (DSP). In a statement, TI said its technology is already shipping into femtocell products from Samsung, Airvana, Huawei, Lyrtech, ZTE and Airhop. However, according to Unstrung, the vendor said it will not begin investing in femtocell-specific silicon for another two years as it believes the market is currently too fragmented. “If you have a cost optimised solution today, you end up having it tailored to something and make some compromises,” said Josef Alt, business development manager of the communications infrastructure group at TI. “There’s great value in having a product here to adapt to various requirements of the market.”

Rather than being specifically designed for femtocells, TI’s new DSP – the TCI6484 – is designed for base stations of all sizes and supports all the major mobile air interfaces, including GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, WiMAX and LTE. According to Alt, a femtocell based on the new DSP would have a total Bill Of Materials (BOM) cost of US$200. Unstrung notes that this is some way short of the sub-US$100 price point for femtocells desired by operators. However, Alt said the product would serve as a useful migration product towards future solutions with a cheaper BOM made possible by higher shipment volumes. He predicted this tipping point to occur around 2010.