Femtocells - one of biggest themes at MWC 2010 - picoChip extends market leadership

Analysts, journalists and customers agreed on the importance of femtocells. Caroline Gabriel, of ReThink Research wrote: “As expected, femtocells are one of the big themes of this year's Mobile World Congress. Operators like Vodafone UK, its joint venture SFR in France, Softbank in Japan and AT&T in the US are getting serious about their HSPA femto deployments in the home, and the industry is looking ahead to 'greater femtocells' - the ones that get beyond the living room into enterprises and the great outdoors.”

The commercial reality of femtocells was fully evident at picoChip’s “FemtoWall”, showing 15 different picoChip-enabled femtocell products. FemtoWall was one of the most photographed displays in the entire exhibition, with products from Alcatel Lucent (both residential and enterprise femtocells), Alpha Networks, Argela, Askey, BTI, Contela, C&S Micro, GWT, ipAccess, Sagem, Ubiquisys and Zyxel. The total number of manufacturers using the industry-leading picoXcell(TM) solution for femtocells has now been confirmed at over 20 (http://www.picochip.com/news/138/).

Lord Davies, UK Minister for Trade, Investment and Small Business, was hosted on a visit to the picoChip stand by CTO Doug Pulley. The Minister was particularly interested in picoChip’s growth and recent funding rounds, and witnessed picoChip’s live LTE demonstration (using the newly-launched PC960x LTE small cell system).

Developed in association with Continuous Computing and Cavium Networks (NASDAQ: CAVM) the PC960x solution helps accelerate time to market for product developers, femtocell access point manufacturers, network equipment vendors and operators

picoChip also announced two new Release 8 femtocell SoCs, maintaining its competitive advantage in the HSPA+ silicon market. The new PC313 and PC323 chips extend picoChip’s proven, robust, operator-deployed picoXcell family of devices, creating not just the most mature range of devices but also the most extensive. These new products deliver a number of industry firsts including 3GPP Release 8 features such as 42Mbps uplink and 11Mbps downlink data rates, and are the first femtocell chipsets to support receive diversity, a critical technology for enterprise or wide-area femtocell deployment

Aditya Kaul, Practice Director of Mobile Networks at ABI Research, commented, “picoChip is a market leader in UMTS and HSPA femtocell silicon with multiple OEM/ODM wins and commercial femtocells in the field using their chipset. As other chip companies enter this space, PC313 and PC323 are Rel 8 specified providing a significant improvement in capabilities and performance compared to existing solutions.”

“MWC served to highlight the huge strides being taken by the femtocell industry and by picoChip,” commented Nigel Toon, CEO of picoChip. “With new products, new customers and new partners picoChip continues to deliver market leading femtocell solutions, and the fact that our technology was powering the majority of the femtocell offerings on display at the show was significant. Moreover, and perhaps even more pleasingly, femtocells were clearly on everyone’s mind at the show and we are seeing real commercial traction for femtocells in a huge range of market sectors and geographies.”