Mindspeed extends lead in TD-SCDMA small cells with new reference design

Mindspeed is currently the only system-on-chip (SoC) company to offer TD-SCDMA small cell solutions and now has a total of seven customers in China.

Everyone is in agreement over the need for small cells, particularly to deliver capacity in enterprise and urban environments, and this is no different for TD-SCDMA, said Yingbo Jiang, vice president and general manager of China's wireless business unit, at Mindspeed. We are the first and only company to support this massive market with an SoC solution, and have seven customers using our TD-SCDMA solution. Beyond 3G, we are the only company to have demonstrated both Frequency-Division Duplexing (LTE FDD) and Time-Division Duplex Long-Term Evolution (TD-LTE) for small cells, and we are working on dual-mode combining TD-LTE and TD-SCDMA.

Following Mindspeed's acquisition of Picochip, the new reference design demonstrates the synergies of the two companies' products. It combines the best of each company's silicon expertise, with the PC205 baseband processor and the C1000 CPE processor working together on the PC8818 software stack for 16-user systems.

Picochip has a strong history in the Chinese market and it's great to see this continue after the acquisition by Mindspeed, said Yang Hua, secretary-general, TD-SCDMA Industry Alliance (TDIA). China Mobile is the biggest operator in the world with almost one billion subscribers. Small cells are the only way to provide coverage and capacity to this many people, particularly in dense urban areas and this makes the new reference design from Mindspeed very important to the Chinese market.

The new PC8818 software stack is fully compatible with China Mobile's TD-SCDMA enterprise femtocell specification, following Mindspeed's role as one of the key contributors. The higher performing PC205 is also pin-to-pin compatible with the PC202, enabling customers to reuse their residential femtocell hardware design. Finally, while the PC8818 improves some key algorithms in the receiver to support 16 simultaneous users, it still maintains the same API to the high-layer protocol stack allowing customers to integrate their existing femtocell software stack. Combined, these measures significantly reduce risk for customers, accelerating time to market.