Texas Instruments (normally known as TI) was founded in 1951 in Dallas, USA. The first integrated circuits were invented in their labs in 1958. They are now the number 3 chip manufacturer worldwide (after Intel and Samsung), and are a major manufacturer of chips for mobile handsets.

The company has always been strong in DSP (Digital Signal Processor) products, which are frequently used for applications involving audio or video processing as well as radio (RF) signal processing.

Like other major silicon vendors, their approach has not been to invest heavily in specific chipset designs, but to allow some vendors to use their standard high performance DSP chips in their early products. Their view has been that the product volumes won't become significant until 2011 or later, and so it isn't worthwhile investing heavily before then. This involves higher prices per unit, but more flexibility because more aspects can be changed through software/firmware updates.

Their standard TCI6484 chip can be programmed for use to support a wide variety of air interfaces, including 2G GSM, CDMA, UMTS and LTE.

TI is also reported to be working with leading femtocell software company Continuous Computing to port its L2/L3 software stack to the TCI6484

Their customer list includes Samsung, Huawei, ZTE and Airvana.

Interview with Josef Alt, TI's communications infrastructure business development manager for Europe by EEtimes

Ti's femtocell presentation at Femto conference in December 2008

Launched more specific versions of its DSP platform with two new parts targetted for femtocells. Built on the core of the TCI6484 mentioned above, the TCI6485 has two 850MHz DSP cores whilst the TCI6489 has three and is aimed at enterprise applications. The main difference between the earlier designs is the addition of receive accelerator blocks (RAC) and Rake Search Accelerator (RSA) instruction sets for W-CDMA.  

TI's website

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