3G home base station radio for femtocell market

3 October 2007 Telecoms, Datacoms, Wireless, IoT

Figures from ABI Research predict that there will be 102 million home base station, or femtocell, users worldwide by 2011. The femtocell handles cellular calls locally and traffic is then carried to the operator's core network via broadband connections. This not only reduces the need for multiple handsets (or expensive 'dual-mode' cellular and WiFi terminals), it also allows network coverage and capacity to be increased in a cost-effective manner, exactly where they are most needed by the end user.

Cambridge Consultants has designed a cellular base station radio based on a consumer-grade handset component, to support picoChip's reference design for the 3G femtocell market. The radio extends picoChip's reference design for a 3G home base station, providing developers with a low cost implementation. Femtocell 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 breaks new ground by adapting an IC created for low-cost/high-volume handset applications to implement the high-specification base station 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 base station design requires just these two major ICs - a bill of materials that meets the aggressive cost targets needed for this mass application. Alternative implementations can require more expensive carrier-class radio components, combined with processing cores based on both DSP and FPGA technologies. The 3G base station design supports HSDPA and HSUPA (high speed downlink packet access and uplink packet access) data rates of 7 Mbps and 2 Mbps respectively.

The design is based on a commercial handset radio IC, and the PC202 picoArray - picoChip's device targeted at high volume applications. This latter multicore DSP incorporates an array of processors, combined with an ARM 926EJ-S processor and other resources needed to implement a baseband processor, including a cryptographic engine and turbo coding logic.

For more information visit www.cambridgeconsultants.com

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