U.K’s 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 femtocells. The radio extends picoChip's reference design for a 3G home base station, providing developers with an exceptionally low cost implementation for a global market that is expected to grow to over 100 million units within a few years, according to the developers. Market data from ABI Research predicts 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.

As a result, by allowing customers to use their existing standard cellular handsets, femotcell products will allow cellular operators to competitive effectively with technologies like Universal Mobile Access (UMA) and voice-over-WiFi (VoWiFi), asserted the developer.

According to picoChip, it awarded the design contract to Cambridge Consultants because the product developer offered experience of designing radios for highly cost sensitive markets such as 2G, ZigBee, DECT and Bluetooth.

The resulting 3G home base station design requires just these two major ICs. A commercial handset radio IC, and the PC202 picoArray, picoChip's multi-core DSP targeted at high volume applications. This latter multi-core 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.

"There are numerous radio consultancies out there, but few with a track record in creating designs optimized for low-cost/high-volume consumer applications," said Rupert Baines, picoChip's vice president of marketing. "Cambridge Consultants gave us this skill, backed by the knowledge that our engineering teams work well together - as demonstrated on a successful previous WiMAX project."

"If this application is to succeed, the bill of materials has to be in the same ballpark as a WiFi access point, a market with a supplier base that has a lead of several years in driving down costs," noted Cambridge Consultants' Tim Fowler. "A novel architectural split gave us the key - allowing us to use an existing consumer IC for the radio. We believe that this design could trim a year or more off the time it would normally take OEMs to get the costs of 3G access points down to the point needed for mass roll out."

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