Date: 28/02/2012

Silicon and software for small-cell base-station hot at MWC

Small cell base station is another area with more players displaying solutions at Mobile World Congress 2012. As per the market research study by Informa Telecoms & Media, small cell are estimated to grow from 3.2 million in 2012 to 62.4 million by 2016, an exploding growth!
Small cell requires complex SoC and more complex software to support LTE. Here below is the brief news from vendors announcing small cell base station tech (also called picocell and femtocell).

Ericsson has introduced pico radio base station with integrated Wi-Fi. Ericsson says it is now possible to easily add small cells to the network in the form of Ericsson's new small RBS products, using both 3GPP-licensed spectrum and unlicensed spectrum such as Wi-Fi, both of which can be transported over the same backhaul.

Tata Elxsi has announced the availability of a comprehensive LTE Small cell software suite to quickly enable SoC based implementations including L1, L2/L3 and radio integration. Tata Elxsi says the protocol stack for L2/L3 is specially designed for Small cell functionality and has several improvements and optimization to suit System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture requirements.

Broadcom has introduced a new line of switch solutions for the small cell base station market. BCM56240 series is system-on-a-chip (SoC) solution combining the functionality of up to four stand-alone components on a single chip.

Mindspeed Technologies in collaboration with JUNI developed LTE femtocells and other small cell dual mode 3G/LTE solutions. The collaboration combines Mindspeed's carrier-grade Transcede SoC baseband processor solutions with JUNI's development expertise.

Freescale semiconductor said it will provide QorIQ Qonverge PSC913x femtocell products with commercial LTE Layer 1 software for small cell base stations. Freescale claims this offering is one of the industry's first LTE Layer 1 software stacks on a fully scalable base station SoC platform featuring multimode support for LTE + WCDMA. Ip.access is using Freescale's chips in its base stations.

Cavium to showcase what it calls the industry's highest performing processors optimized for LTE Mobile Infrastructure, that scale from small cell base stations to the Evolved Packet Core (EPC). Cavium to demonstrate a line-rate LTE small cell base station solution based on the OCTEON Fusion "Base Station-on-a-Chip" family and an LTE Evolved Packet Core (EPC) solution that can scale to 1Tbps (1000Gbps) based on OCTEON multi-core processors.

Minieum has selected Radisys' Trillium protocol software for its dual-mode enterprise and residential small cell solutions, combining 3G and Wi-Fi services in one unit. Radisys is showcasing its small cell solutions at Mobile World Congress.

Texas Instruments is collaborating with Aricent in providing software stack for base stations developers using TI's chips.

The highlight is the partnership between silicon vendors and software developers.