picoChip and Cambridge Consultants collaborate on LTE Femtocell platform enhancement

This collaboration is the latest in a long history of partnership between the companies. Cambridge Consultants and picoChip have previously worked together to deliver wireless infrastructure solutions for standards-based products, for proprietary technologies as well as military and defence customers. In some cases this has been development of completely new products, for example Iridium Communications Inc's satellite system. In others, it has involved working together to enhance the performance and extend the capabilities of picoChip's standards-compliant reference designs to enable customers to create differentiated, unique products such as specialist femtocells.

“As the femtocell market heats up our customers are turning to us to provide platforms that help them get to market faster with ever greater degrees of differentiation. Cambridge Consultants has been invaluable in enabling us to offer a range of extra features and capabilities based on our core technology,” said David Maidment, Director of Product Management at picoChip.

“For this latest collaboration we knew that, with a broadband wireless technology as demanding as LTE, and with very high market expectation, we required a partner that we could truly rely on. We had full confidence that Cambridge Consultants could deliver exactly what we needed, when we needed it, to expand the capabilities of our LTE offering in what were very demanding timescales. Their ability to work closely with us and their approach to development ensured that we got the quality that our customers expect.”

LTE is the first cellular standard to achieve global acceptance. It promises to deliver higher capacity and lower operational costs for network operators, to allow them to continue to expand their mobile broadband services and reach even more customers. Small cells are seen as an essential tool for mobile operators to deliver both capacity and coverage to users wherever they are. picoChip is the recognised market leader in small-cell technology, and the company’s LTE platform enables this new and exciting capability for many more product suppliers.

“The enhancements picoChip was targeting represented a significant engineering challenge for both companies,” commented Tim Fowler, Commercial Director in Cambridge Consultants' wireless division. “However, we have been working with picoChip and their devices for many years now and our experience of their platform, combined with our rigorous development process, meant that we were able to help picoChip quickly and efficiently achieve their targets.”

The PC960x is the world’s first full hardware and software development platform for LTE femtocells, delivering quick and simple development and prototyping to customers and bringing together full evaluation and prototyping capabilities. The PC960x accelerates time to market of small form factor LTE products (“Home eNode B”) optimised for metropolitan, enterprise and residential applications.