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| Femto on a Chip |
| Written by Dave Burstein |
| Sunday, 16 November 2008 13:07 |
If the price comes down, AT&T, Softbank, and others are ready to order 20M  femtocells. A massive femtocell cloud essentially provides them a second network and they see that as a huge competitive advantage. PicoChip is confident their coming highly-integrated chip will allow the needed price breakthru, and are said to have already forward-priced to win the AT&T contract with ipAccess. Tech problems aren't all solved, field and marketing procedures are just being defined, and there's a long way from today's small builds to the tens of millions of homes. Some expect broad deployments in 2010 on WiMAX and 3G; others expect carriers to wait until LTE in the following years. Michelle Donegan at LR points to Designart, Sequens and others as likely competition. She's been doing strong reporting on Femtos. Here's the product info from pidoChip. PC302 Product Brief PC302 Features • Implements a complete Femtocell Access Point (FAP) on a single chip • Includes a complete 3GPP Release 6 WCDMA PHY supporting 14Mbps HDSPA and 5.6Mbps HSUPA together with support for MBMs • Femto Forum compliant security supporting TPM features for IPSec tunneling, key exchange and authentication. • Security features for encrypted code imaging to prevent cloning • Femto Forum compliant FAP Iu interfaces with integrated RNC functionality available (Release 7 compliant) • Hardware support for packet based timing solutions such at IEEE1588 and NTPv3.0. • Timing synchronization software solutions available • 3G and 2G network listen support to enable zero-touch provisioning and interference mitigation (SON TR32.821) • RNC Stack Management for handoff management, congestion control, access control etc • Femto Forum compliant TR-069 based management control • Glueless interface to most WCDMA femtocell RF solutions for cheapest BOM Description The picoChip PC302 is a highly integrated, high performance baseband processor for 3GPP femtocells. The PC302 together with picoChip software offers the cheapest single chip solution for up to 4 users for residential and SME femtocell access points. The programmable platform can support up 14Mbps HSDPA together with 5.6Mbps HSUPA. The PC302 is a low power, low cost complete femtocell solution with integrated PHY, RNC stack, synchronization, network listen and Radio Resource Management solutions available. The unique multi-core architecture also allows flexibility for in field upgrade and spare processing power for customer enhancement and home networking functions. Description The picoChip PC302 is a highly integrated, high performance baseband processor for 3GPP femtocells. The PC302 together with picoImageChip software offers the cheapest single chip solution for up to 4 users for residential and SME femtocell access points. The programmable platform can support up 14Mbps HSDPA together with 5.6Mbps HSUPA. The PC302 is a low power, low cost complete femtocell solution with integrated PHY, RNC stack, synchronization, network listen and Radio Resource Management solutions availab  le. The unique multi-core architecture also allows flexibility for in field upgrade and spare processing power for customer enhancement and home networking functions. |