SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Cavium, Inc., (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, and the digital home, and Symmetricom, (NASDAQ:SYMM), a worldwide leader in precision time and frequency technologies, today announced a collaboration to ensure that 3G and 4G/LTE networks maintain mission critical synchronization. Symmetricom’s SoftClock fully supports both the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) standard as well as the Network Time Protocol (NTP) and has now been certified for operation on Cavium’s OCTEON Fusion™, the industry's most powerful base station-on-a-chip family of SoC’s, enabling joint customers to further accelerate their time to market for their small cell solutions.

Ethernet and IP are rapidly replacing traditional Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) circuit infrastructure in the communications network. This creates "Timing Islands" in the network, which can potentially cause calls to be dropped, connection issues and poor operational effectiveness. Issues such as these cannot be tolerated in todays rapidly growing 3G and 4G/LTE networks, where a carrier’s customers can “vote with their feet” and switch carriers. Mobile services are especially vulnerable as they require absolute precision in synchronized time stamping of packets throughout the network from base stations to the core. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a method to deliver synchronization via the packet network. Together, Cavium and Symmetricom's portfolio offers a solution.

The OCTEON Fusion family delivers breakthrough capacity and throughput for LTE small cell base stations through a high performance multi-core architecture. OCTEON Fusion CNF71XX integrates Cavium’s award-winning OCTEON® multi-core architecture along with purpose-built Baseband DSP cores, extensive LTE hardware accelerators and digital front end (DFE) features into a single chip. The first release of this innovative new family of silicon includes four high performance MIPS64® cores and six DSP’s, along with baseband hardware acceleration units interconnected with a low-latency crossbar and shared memory subsystem, allowing service of more than 128 connected users while delivering line-rate throughput for Uplink and Downlink. Compared to alternate solutions available today, OCTEON Fusion provides up to 4x greater performance within the same power and cost envelope.

Cavium Networks Inc.