picoChip and mimoOn partner on delivery of industry’s first LTE basestation reference design

picoChip today announced that it is collaborating with mimoOn to deliver the industry’s first complete LTE (Long Term Evolution) basestation reference design. The new PC86xx family of LTE reference designs cover the full range of eNode Bs from femtocells to multi-sector macrocells and is supported on the same common hardware platforms as picoChip’s WiMAX products. The system and its MIMO capabilities will be demonstrated at Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona, 11-14 February on the picoChip stand 1D56.

LTE is the 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) 4G architecture and has been designed to improve the UMTS mobile phone standard to cope with future requirements. These include improving efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and better integration with other open standards. LTE has significant commonality with WiMAX, both being based on OFDMA in the downlink, all-IP architecture together with MIMO and adaptive antenna systems (AAS). The PC86xx builds on picoChip’s success as the industry-standard WiMAX reference design, and both standards run on the same common hardware (picoChip PHY plus Wintegra MAC) platforms.

The PC86xx LTE design runs on the same picoChip and Wintegra hardware platforms as the companies’ industry standard WiMAX basestation reference designs. As in WiMAX, the family includes PHY and MAC and scales from single-chip femtocell access points (‘Home eNode B’) to sophisticated multi-sector carrier macrocells from 1.25MHz to 20MHz. Both TDD and FDD modes are supported. The PHY runs on picoChip PC203 devices and includes OFDMA downlink and SC-FDMA uplink, with support for up to 4x4 MIMO and for AAS. The MAC, running on a Wintegra WinPath2 device includes PDCP, RLC, GTP, ROHC, ciphering / deciphering and RLC, including ARQ.

The LTE reference design empowers OEMs with faster time-to-market and lower development costs as they can focus their resources on adding value and differentiating their products. As a software-defined solution, it is future-proof and can be upgraded as the LTE standard is refined and updated. Finally, the common platform also supports WiMAX, with Wave 2 and MIMO available now, and upgrades for Release 1.x (FDD) and 16m.

picoChip Designs Limited
mimoOn GmbH