picoChip powers Xinwei McWiLL basestations for 2008 Olympics

McWiLL combines SCDMA's traditional use in narrowband voice and adds nomadic broadband functionality. It is based on CS-OFDMA (combining the advantages of both OFDMA and CDMA), adaptive modulation and uses dynamic channel allocation, smart antennas, beam-forming and interference cancellation to improve reach and throughput.

In the new design, two picoChip PC203 devices replace nine conventional TI C6xxx high-end DSPs and two large FPGAs, dramatically reducing cost and power. As a Xinwei-developed wireless standard, all the development has been done in-house in Beijing.

“Xinwei is a truly significant player and this is a good example of the advantages of our architecture over traditional DSP, and of our capability to power any standard,” said Doug Pulley, co-founder and CTO of picoChip. “This agreement furthers picoChip’s support for Chinese wireless development, and it is a testimony to the maturity of our architecture and tools that Xinwei has been able to develop such a sophisticated product so quickly.”

“The picoArray is a powerful device that can effectively tackle the extreme signal processing needs of next-generation wireless,” added Dr. Wen Bin, VP of Xinwei. “Designing with such an efficient architecture represents a significant step forward in our migration to deliver designs, easily, and at highly competitive price points.”

McWiLL is ideal for the support of voice and data communications in both urban and rural areas with very large cell sizes. A McWiLL base station delivers 15Mbps per sector over 1-3 kilometers in an urban environment, using 5MHz of spectrum at 1800MHz; while at 400MHz, the range extends from 20 to 60 kilometers. Client devices using a 1MHz subcarrier deliver throughput (download and upload) speeds of 3Mbps while traveling at 120 kilometers per hour.

McWiLL is on show at the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008, and will be used in the coastal city of Qingdao for Olympic sailing events and on a lake in the Shunyi suburb of Beijing for the Olympic rowing contest. The main application will be relaying live race video information back to shore. McWiLL has already been trialed in Guangzhou, Nanning, Beijing and Qingdao for video, voice and data communications.

picoArray devices incorporate arrays of DSP elements, delivering extremely high performance. Already proven in-use for the computationally-intensive tasks involved in advanced wireless signal processing, they are available in forms suitable for both infrastructure and user terminal applications. They offer a powerful platform to develop products for emerging global wireless communications markets such as WiMAX, LTE and 4G. picoChip has a design centre in Beijing and is developing reference designs for TD-SCDMA.