picoChip SoC takes femtocell into public access
Platform brings consumer economics to outdoor base stations
Published: 14 September, 2010
READ MORE: PicoChip Designs | Semiconductor | Femtocell
The femtocell is starting to go mainstream as an indoor device, but its most disruptive impact may well be on the macro base station industry. Already under pressure from price depression and commoditization, traditional infrastructure makers now face the prospect of residential device economics moving up to the macrocell.
This is the aim of femtocell chip leader picoChip, which has released its first system-on-chip for a metro version of the tiny base station architecture. This would take many of the features and economics of a product created for the living room, and apply them to an outdoor 'public access femto', vying to take on the role usually played by the picocell, but at significantly lower cost and complexity.
The UK firm's latest SoC is the picoXcell PC333, which supports 32 voice/data channels, or 64 in cascade mode. It supports 3GPP Release 8 (42Mbps HSPA+) with range of over two kilometres and handover at 120km per hour, plus the LABS (Local Area Base Station) standard, MIMO and soft handover.
It implements receive diversity - not always included in residential femtos, but essential to mitigate interference with these larger user numbers - and smartSignalling. This is the technology, based on 3GPP standards that are not always deployed by vendors, which picoChip showed in its platform earlier this year to handle the 'signalling storm' from always-on phones. It enables a femtocell to support 64 users in active conversation or browsing, and 400 phones engaged in general network signalling or 'chatter'.
The femto base station has a high degree of self-organization, though not the complete SON required of a residential femto. It can be used with the conventional IUb network architecture or the IUh standard created for linking femtocells to gateways and the core. CTO Doug Pulley says the femtocells use so many of the elements of their residential cousins that they significantly reduce cost and support strong scalability. So the same basic architecture is used, with ARM11 plus digital signal processor arrays, making all platforms pin and code compatible.
"Some day, all basestations will be made like this," Pulley said. "Femto technology will soon be in every base station. With the PC333 we have extended the parameters of femtocell performance to levels that would traditionally have been considered as 'picocell' or even 'microcell'. This high performance coupled with zero-touch provisioning means carriers can routinely deploy femtocells as part of their wide area network roll-outs".
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