Date: 18/10/2010

Picocell tech on a chip for 4G driving partnerships and forum initiatives

Flexible cell size is talk of the day for LTE implementation. It can be Femtocell and all the way up to macro cell. Semiconductor vendors are playing key role in this trend of smallcell base stations. Today there are two announcements related to this.

Mindspeed Technologies said it is collaborating with ArrayComm and Continuous Computing on a complete commercial eNodeB solution for LTE-Frequency Division Duplex (LTE-FDD) and LTE-Time Division Duplex (LTE-TDD) mobile networks.

The part of joint solution is Mindspeed's Transcede system-on-chip (SoC) 3G/4G/LTE baseband processor, Trillium LTE software stack from Continuous Computing, and ArrayComm's complete, standards-compliant, interoperable physical-layer (PHY) software. The solution is designed to speed development of LTE basestations that scale economically from femto to macro cell system designs.

"Our collaboration gives customers everything they need to quickly bring high-performance, well-differentiated basestation equipment to the LTE mobile-infrastructure market," said Alan Taylor, marketing director for baseband processing solutions at Mindspeed. "The solution leverages the Transcede family's unprecedented computational horsepower and scalable architecture to meet heavy LTE processing demands while enabling the same Layer One and Layer Two software components to be ported across a wide range of platform designs."

Mindspeed says its new class of high-performance silicon, the Transcede family of SoCs can deliver three sectors of LTE processing in a single device and enables the first 64-user "picocell on a chip."
These 3 vendors offering a combined system solution, where the software developed on one chip to be ported to other chip across the full range of system platforms, including enterprise femtocell, picocell (indoor and outdoor), microcell and macrocell basestations.

In another closely related announcement, UK based mobile communication chip and technology specialist picoChip has announced its support for the newly announced Femto Forum LTE application programming interfaces (APIs). The new APIs are fully supported by picoChip's PC8608/9 LTE products.

Femto Forum initiative addresses three fundamental LTE femtocell functions: The interface from baseband to radio; scheduling (to assign packets to frequency and time slots); and network monitoring (to minimize interference with the macro network and optimize femtocell coverage).

PicoChip is a semiconductor and technology pioneer in the concept of picocell and Femtcell base station. PicoChip's programmable wireless processors are designed to handle the present wireless protocols and standards such as GSM, HSPA, TD-SCDMA, WiMAX, cdma2000, LTE and LTE-Advanced. PicoChip said it has shipped one-million+ wireless semiconductor chips.