Broadband Gateways/CPE & Home Networking

Over the last decade, the number of broadband subscribers has grown dramatically around the globe.  As of September 2011, there were approximately 500 million worldwide subscribers to DSL, cable and PON/FTTH broadband services.  This number is expected to grow by almost 50% to 734 million in 2015 (Infonetics, Sep '11).  With the advent of LTE as a viable wireless broadband technology, the future looks even more exciting for the broadband market. 

As volumes continue to grow and cost pressures increase, integration will be a key part of the evolution of broadband CPE/gateways and home networking equipment. Architectures which traditionally included a separate modem box, router and WiFi access point are now moving to become all-in-one residential gateways. These gateways increasingly include additional features such as powerline/cable networking, storage, security, DECT, managed services frameworks (e.g. OSGI) and smart home application support. Performance has also been on the rise as the various broadband flavors of DSL, cable and PON evolve to their next-generation high-bandwidth variants. Despite the demand for more features and performance in these boxes, cost and power are expected to stay the same or decrease. Hence system design and cost reduction pressures are very high for OEMs.

MIPS® Solutions

With one of the industry's leading processor architectures for networking, MIPS Technologies continues to deliver solutions that enable intelligence in a variety of home networking equipment from gateways/IADs to wireless access points, routers, femtocells and more. For these devices, MIPS' portfolio of 32-bit processors offers a broad array of performance-efficient solutions that lead to high performance, low power consumption and small silicon die area. MIPS' unique multi-threading technology enables even greater performance efficiency. With these solutions, SoC manufacturers can deliver feature-rich and power/cost effective home networking ICs and broadband processors.

The multi-threaded MIPS32® 1004K™ Coherent Processing System allows not only high instructions per cycle (IPC) but also support flexible Quality of Service (QoS) schemes as well as multi-OS support in a single core via Virtual Processing Elements (VPEs). Products such as residential gateway SoCs, which concurrently run a variety of software spanning from latency-sensitive applications (e.g. VoIP) with less latency-sensitive network processing applications can take advantage of multi-threading to provide very efficient architectures.

For applications such as WiFi processing, the superscalar MIPS32®1074K™ Coherent Processing System is ideal for delivering the highest performance over a single thread. Both the 1004K and 1074K cores can also integrate the DSP Application Specific Extension (ASE), which is ideal for integrating and accelerating signal processing for applications such as VoIP. Coupled with their multiprocessing capabilities, both the 1004K and 1074K cores provide the ultimate flexibility and scalability for a wide range of home networking applications. For more lightweight applications, MIPS also offers the multi-threaded MIPS32® 34K™ core and the MIPS32® M14K™/4K™ cores for real-time control applications.