LONDON — Lime Microsystems Ltd. (Guildford, England) and PicoChip Designs Ltd. (Bath, England) have announced they are collaborating to develop a reference design for femtocells for third- and fourth-generation communications.
The platform will operate in all frequency bands of interest, including existing and emerging bands. It will be based on Lime's multi-band multi-standard RF transceiver IC, the LMS6002, and one of PicoChip's PicoXcell baseband processors, the companies said.
The LMS6002 is a multi-band multi-standard RF transceiver IC operates at user-selectable frequencies between 375-MHz and 4-GHz and is suitable for WCDMA/HSPA, CDMA2000, WiMAX, and LTE standards. The transceiver can be digitally configured to operate in the full range of frequency bands, with 16 user-selectable signal bandwidths up to 28-MHz. This removes the need for individual transceiver chips for each of the different bands, and allows a small cell base station to be reconfigured rapidly and simply.
The configurable nature of the reference design will enable femtocell deployment using less common cellular frequencies, such as 700-MHz or 1.5-GHz, the companies said.
"The reference platform will enable our mutual customers to accelerate development cycles for femtocell products and will support easier migration from 3G to 4G technology," said Philippe Roux, vice president of business development of Lime Microsystems, in a statement.
"Lime offers an RF transceiver solution that can operate in any frequency band, allowing it to address femtocell applications which cannot be served by other solutions," said Rupert Baines, vice president of marketing at PicoChip, in the same statement.
Related links and articles:
www.limemicro.com
www.picochip.com
Lime, Blue Wonder partner on LTE reference design
PicoChip raises $20 million
TI claims major femtocell design wins
Production measurements on 3GPP WCDMA femtocells
