Cellular success

Cambridge Consultants has designed a cellular basestation radio based on a consumer-grade handset component, to support picoChip's reference design for the 3G femtocell market.

The radio is said to extend picoChip's reference design for a 3G home basestation, providing developers with an low cost implementation for a global market that is expected to grow to 100 million units per annum within a few years. Femotcell products allow cellular operators to counter the competitive technologies of UMA (Universal Mobile Access) and VoWiFi (voice-over-WiFi), with the added advantage of allowing customers to use their existing standard cellular handsets.

The HSDPA/HSUPA-compatible WCDMA design is said to break new ground by adapting an IC created for low-cost/high-volume handset applications to implement the high-specification basestation radio, combined with an architectural split that exploits the very high computational performance available in the picoArray DSP device to perform the baseband and system control functions.

The resulting 3G home basestation design requires just these two major ICs - a bill of materials that meets the cost targets needed for this mass application. Alternative implementations can require more expensive carrier-class radio components, combined with processing cores based on DSP and FPGA technologies. The 3G basestation design supports HSDPA and HSUPA (high speed downlink packet access and uplink packet access) data rates of 7 Mbits/second and 2 Mbits/second respectively.