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Continued ...

While Ericsson's attempts to pour cold water on 3G femtocells are understandable, Texas Instruments' scepticism is perhaps to be taken more seriously, especially - from a volume point of view - if it keeps a major chipmaker out of the market for any length of time. The company's infrastructure division says that, despite finding the technology interesting (and sponsoring one of the recent femtocell conferences) it has so far failed to find a convincing profit model, and is actually considering transferring the activity to the handset operation, which has greater experience of creating chips for consumer products.

In the mean time, the hesitancy of TI, Qualcomm and Broadcom, and the exit of STMicro, creates a major opportunity for the chip designers that have specialized in this market at an early stage, notably the UK's picoChip (with some activity from ADI, Xilinx and, in WiMAX, Sequans). While some would-be femtocell players, such as RadioFrame, Airvana (in CDMA) and NextWave, are designing their own silicon, picoChip has dominated the nascent market so far, and is the only company to have shipped a baseband specifically designed for a femtocell at this point.

The company's PC6532 reference design delivers an integrated PHY and MAC Wave 2 solution in a single chip, the picoArraybased PC205 processor. The reference design supports WiMAX Wave 2 and full IO-MIMO with Matrix A and Matrix B downlink, and both MRC and UL-CSM uplink. The WiMAX architecture is scalable from femtocells to multi-sector macrocells. The PC205 processor integrates an ARM processor for MAC functionality, and picoArray multi-core DSP for software defined PHY.

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