picoChip and mimoOn Partner on Delivery of LTE Basestation Reference Design

(Business News & Technology News, 12 Feb 2008)

picoChip is collaborating with mimoOn to deliver what is claimed to be the first complete LTE (Long Term Evolution) basestation reference design—the PC86xx family—which will cover the full range of eNode Bs from femtocells to multi-sector macrocells and is supported on the same common hardware platforms as picoChip's WiMAX products. The system and its MIMO capabilities is currently being demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona, Spain, February 11 to 14.

LTE is the 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) 4G architecture and has been designed to improve the UMTS mobile phone standard to cope with future requirements. These include improving efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and better integration with other open standards. LTE has significant commonality with WiMAX, both being based on OFDMA in the downlink, all-IP architecture together with MIMO and adaptive antenna systems (AAS). The PC86xx builds on picoChip's success as the industry-standard WiMAX reference design, and both standards run on the same common hardware (picoChip PHY plus Wintegra MAC) platforms.

The PC86xx LTE design runs on the same picoChip and Wintegra hardware platforms as the companies' industry standard WiMAX basestation reference designs. As in WiMAX, the family includes PHY and MAC and scales from single-chip femtocell access points ("Home eNode B") to sophisticated multi-sector carrier macrocells from 1.25MHz to 20MHz. Both TDD and FDD modes are supported. The PHY runs on picoChip PC203 devices and includes OFDMA downlink and SC-FDMA uplink, with support for up to 4x4 MIMO and for AAS. The MAC, running on a Wintegra WinPath2 device includes PDCP, RLC, GTP, ROHC, ciphering / deciphering and RLC, including ARQ.

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