GSM

Picochip's technology behind the industry's smallest 2G and 3G femtocell basestation.

Cambridge Consultants, a leading design and development firm, have launched Sidewinder™, the smallest commercially available 2G and 3G small-cell platform in July 2011.

Ideal for use in mobile phone communications and professional radio, Sidewinder is software configurable between GSM/GPRS.EDGE, WCDMA/HSPA+ and other SDR applications, providing new levels of adaptability for cellular basestations. It offers a low cost of entry for companies wishing to exploit these standards and sets a new benchmark in flexible, cost effective designs.

Sidewinder's unrivalled flexibility is based upon two novel technologies. On the front end, Sidewinder makes use of the class-leading flexible radio device from Lime Microsystems Limited. Connected to this is Picochip's latest PC312 femtocell baseband SoC, delivering high performance DSP and an ARM application processor combined with low power consumption, making it suitable for some battery-powered applications. Sidewinder can also be easily integrated into basestation or mobile units for Police, Emergency Services and other Professional Radio users.

The full release is available here.

The Centaur physical layer (PHY) Centaur from Cambridge Consultants is a full GSM / GPRS / EDGE / E-EDGE (Release 7) Base Transceiver Station (BTS) Physical Layer (PHY) reference targeted at Picochip’s highly integrated baseband processors, and supported by a comprehensive test framework.

It enables manufacturers to very quickly develop extremely low-cost basestations, whether for residential femtocells or cost-sensitive macrocell applications.

It can be used to implement a GSM femtocell, either as a dedicated system or integrated with Picochip HSPA solutions, or as a fully featured picocell or microcell. The complete BTS has a small footprint so that, for example, and a number of modems can be implemented in a single PC203 to implement a powerful multi-channel basestation.

Cambridge Consultants can also provide support services to assist with the integration of the PHY into products.