PicoChip has signed an agreement with Korea Telecom (KT) to develop WiBro/WiMAX access points, sometimes called Femtocells. KT has launched a commercial WiBro service in Seoul and plans to cover most of South Korea by 2008.
Femtocells are small, low-cost basestations, intended to be used in residential or corporate environments. By enabling cost-effective deployment they allow carriers to complete with UMA or voice-over-WiFi. The basestations will use picoChip’s multi-core DSP, which is also being widely used for W-CDMA Femtocells.
“This is a hugely important development partnership for us. KT is one of the most serious operators of the Korean version of WiMAX, and the operator is determined to make this work and pump-prime the technology and use of small, cost-efficient home basestations,” Rupert Baines, vice president of marketing at picoChip (Bath, England) told EE Times.
Mobile WiMAX (802.16e) gets its range and cost advantage with a boatload of technology. Mobile WiMAX features subchannelization, beamforming, MIMO and space division multiplexing but requires heavy lifting from the base station (and CPE).
PicoChip’s secret sauce is a scaleable, multi-processor baseband IC that combines the computational density of a dedicated ASIC with the programmability of a high end Digital Signal Processor. PicoChip says it can deliver the best MIPS per dollar with their PC20x family of multi-core DSP chips that enable a single chip WiMAX PHY with integrated ARM for upper layer protocols.
