picoChip is first baseband company to support new LTE femtocell APIs

The LTE APIs have been defined over the past two years with contributions from many companies, including picoChip as one of the key participants. picoChip’s Dr Clare Somerville acted as co-editor and was shortlisted for the 2010 Femto Forum Award for Individual Contribution in recognition of her role in the project.

The new APIs are already fully supported by picoChip’s industry-leading PC8608/9 LTE products, which form the basis of the system level products the company has developed with partners, demonstrating the reality of these standards.

This new Femto Forum initiative addresses three fundamental LTE femtocell functions: The interface from baseband to radio; scheduling (to assign packets to frequency and time slots); and network monitoring (to minimize interference with the macro network and optimize femtocell coverage). Crucially, the APIs enable vendors like picoChip to differentiate with unique approaches to the various key areas, while helping ensure their solutions are compatible with other compliant femtocell components and subsystems.

picoChip is the industry’s leading supplier of femtocell technology and silicon, shipping in volume for use on multiple carriers’ networks. The company’s picoXcell SoCs crystallize five years’ experience in the field; its picoArray(TM) programmable wireless processors are class-leading, flexible, programmable solutions for any wireless standard, including GSM, HSPA, TD-SCDMA, WiMAX, cdma2000, LTE and LTE-Advanced. Over the last 18 months the company has grown into the leading provider of femtocell technology with its chips in the majority of today's commercially available femtocells. picoChip is the only femtocell chip company shipping to multiple carrier deployments in high volume, and announced in June it had passed the milestone of one-million chips shipped.