picoChip Reference Design for 3G Home Basestation - Cambridge Consultants

Cambridge Consultants extends picoChip's Reference Design for 3G Home Basestation. The company has designed a cellular basestation radio based on a consumer-grade handset component, to support picoChip's reference design for the 3G market. The resulting 3G home basestation design requires just these two major ICs. The 3G basestation design supports HSDPA (high speed downlink packet access) and HSUPA (high speed uplink packet access) data rates of 7 Mbits/second and 2 Mbits/second respectively.

Femotcell products allow cellular operators to counter the competitive technologies of UMA (Universal Mobile Access) and VoWiFi (voice-over-WiFi), with the added advantage of allowing customers to use their existing standard cellular handsets.

Tim Fowler, Cambridge Consultants, said:

If this application is to succeed, the bill of materials has to be in the same ballpark as a WiFi access point, a market with a supplier base that has a lead of several years in driving down costs…

…A novel architectural split gave us the key - allowing us to use an existing consumer IC for the radio. We believe that this design could trim a year or more off the time it would normally take OEMs to get the costs of 3G access points down to the point needed for mass roll out.

The HSDPA/HSUPA-compatible WCDMA design breaks new ground by adapting an IC created for low-cost/high-volume handset applications to implement the high-specification basestation radio, combined with an architectural split that exploits the very high computational performance available in the picoArray DSP device to perform the baseband and system control functions.

The resulting 3G home basestation design requires just these two major ICs - a bill of materials that meets the aggressive cost targets needed for this mass application. Alternative implementations can require more expensive carrier-class radio components, combined with processing cores based on both DSP and FPGA technologies. The 3G basestation design supports HSDPA and HSUPA (high speed downlink packet access and uplink packet access) data rates of 7 Mbits/second and 2 Mbits/second respectively.

picoChip awarded the design contract to Cambridge Consultants because the product developer offered experience of designing radios for highly cost sensitive markets such as 2G, ZigBee, DECT and Bluetooth.

The design is based on a commercial handset radio IC, and the PC202 picoArray - picoChip's device targeted at high volume applications. This latter multi-core DSP incorporates an array of processors, combined with an ARM 926EJ-S processor, and other resources needed to implement a baseband processor including a cryptographic engine and turbo coding logic.

About Cambridge Consultants
Cambridge Consultants develops breakthrough products, creates and licenses intellectual property, and provides business consultancy in technology critical issues for clients worldwide. With a team of over 250 engineers, designers, scientists and consultants, in offices in Cambridge (UK) and Boston (USA), Cambridge Consultants offers solutions across a diverse range of industries including medical technology, transport, energy, industrial and consumer products, automotive and wireless communications.

About picoChip
picoChip Designs Ltd provides innovative, flexible wireless solutions to help equipment makers minimize time-to-market, costs, and system power consumption. The heart of the company's offering is a scaleable, multi-processor baseband IC that combines the computational density of a dedicated ASIC with the programmability of a traditional high end Digital Signal Processor. This radically reduces both development time and materials cost and enables the strategic goal of the "Software Defined Radio". The company has the most comprehensive reference designs in the industry, with complete, standard-compliant solutions for both UMTS (including HSxPA) and WiMAX (802.16d and 802.16e).

More info:  Cambridge Consultants: picoChip Reference Design for 3G Home Basestation