picoChip today announced that it has signed a development partnership agreement with the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) of Korea in the area of Software Defined Radio for WCDMA/HSDPA and WiMAX. The arrangement takes the form of an engineering co-operation including joint development and research into future wireless technologies. As part of this a team from ETRI will be based at picoChip’s Bath headquarters for a year.

The agreement was signed by Dr Yim Chu-Hwan, President of ETRI, and Guillaume d'Eyssautier, President and CEO of picoChip, in London, UK.

Dr Yim Chu-Hwan, President of ETRI, said, "For our Software Defined Radio project we evaluated all the programmable architectures and selected picoChip on the basis of price-performance, flexibility and suitability for next generation wireless technologies. In addition, next-generation wireless requires significantly more processing power than current technologies, and the picoArrayTM architecture delivers where others cannot."

Guillaume d’Eyssautier, President and CEO of picoChip, added, “ETRI is one of the world’s leading telecom research institutes – an example is the role it had in developing the WiBRO standard. We are very proud to work together in the implementation of advanced wireless systems based on SDR technologies."

Korea leads the world in broadband adoption and wireless usage, particularly 3G. It will be the first country to introduce true portable broadband when it launches WiBRO (mobile WiMAX) services next year. ETRI is the leading telecom research institute in Korea, and was responsible for drafting the WiBRO specification.

picoChip provides solutions to the key challenges of cost, development time and flexibility for next generation of wireless systems. The company’s processor, the PC102, delivers world-beating price / performance and has achieved design wins with numerous major companies developing wireless infrastructure. Uniquely, the company also delivers complete, standard compliant reference designs for UMTS (including HSDPA, upgradeable to HSUPA) and WiMAX/WiBRO (16d upgradeable to 16e for mobility). The PC102 is also suited to TD-SCDMA, and has customers developing systems for this standard.

Photo caption L-R: Guillaume d'Eyssautier, President and CEO of picoChip and Dr Yim Chu-Hwan, President of ETRI.