picoChip, mimoOn develop LTE base station reference design

WiMAX semiconductor company picoChip said it is collaborating with mimoOn to deliver the industry's first complete LTE base station reference design. The new PC86xx family of LTE reference designs cover the full range of eNode Bs from femtocells to multi-sector macrocells and is supported on the same common hardware platforms as picoChip's WiMAX products.

The move dramatically decreases the development cost and time to market for LTE, Rupert Baines, picoChip's vice president of marketing, told FierceBroadbandWireless. As a software-defined solution, it is future-proof and can be upgraded as the LTE standard is refined and updated. Finally, the common platform also supports WiMAX, with Wave 2 and MIMO available now, and upgrades for Release 1.x (FDD) and 16m.

"The reuse from WiMAX to LTE is about 70 percent," Baines said. "For our customers, they can reuse virtually everything. They've already designed the hardware and they just need to download a new code. There is a huge commonality."

For more about the partnership:
- read this release [1]

Related articles:
picoChip, Korea Telecom to develop femtocells Report [2] 
picoChip teams with Systems4Silicon Release [3]