Software-upgradeable solution for 802.16d and e reduces risk, speeds development and accelerates time-to-market

picoChip today announced it has publicly demonstrated its Modem, designed to be WiMAX compliant, at the IEEE 802.16 Standards Committee meeting in Shenzen, China. The end-to-end system is software based, and allows seamless upgrade to the formal 802.16d specification, and all amendments. The same architecture can be upgraded to 802.16e for mobility later this year. The picoChip system delivers a complete solution, enabling OEMs to accelerate their development of cost-effective WiMAX-certifiedTM basestations and CPE.

Doug Pulley, co-founder and CTO of picoChip said while in Shenzen; “Our architecture is very well suited to complex wireless, and delivering a software defined 802.16d system shows this. We are proud to have had the opportunity to demonstrate our WiMAX Modem: in effect, this is an 802.16 ‘chipset’ for companies who need a system, but with the flexibility a conventional chipset can never support.”

The picoChip WiMAX Modem is a ‘shrink-wrapped’ complete solution and delivers high quality, advanced, carrier-class performance with a considerably lower bill-of-materials than traditional DSP+FPGA architectures. It will support 802.16d, including OFDMA and scalable PHY. It also integrates a high performance lower-MAC. There is optional support for MIMO, advanced FEC and smart antennas. The system is suited to both basestations and high-end subscriber stations.

The system is future-proof and will accelerate market acceptance of 802.16 by enabling carriers to deploy with fixed (802.16d) and still maintain the ability to upgrade to mobility (802.16e) and full WiMAX compliance effortlessly at a later date. It thus removes the fears against obsolescence and the risks of rapidly evolving standards.

The picoArrayTM provides unprecedented flexibility to address evolving standards or the introduction of new features, and it is straightforward to implement IEEE 802.16d (next generation fixed), 802.16e (mobility) and the Korean broadband wireless standard Wibro (also called HPi). This includes trouble-free support for TDD or FDD, increased channel bandwidths, larger FFT sizes, sub-channelisation or new FEC-modes (turbo-code or LDPC). It also enables efficient use of multiple antennas at high sample rates, critically important for advanced algorithms such as adaptive antennas, space-time-coding (STC) and MIMO.