picoChip powers first software-upgradeable basestation to achieve WiMAX certification
picoChip and Airspan Networks are proud to announce complete WiMAX Forum certification of Airspan’s MacroMAX Basestation for the 3.5GHz FDD profile. The MacroMAX is powered by picoChip’s software upgradeable architecture, as are Airspan’s HiperMAX and MicroMAX-SDR basestation models which are expected to achieve certified status during 2006. All three products can support both 256 OFDM and SOFDMA PHYs. Airspan is the first vendor to complete certification of an end-to-end WiMAX system for the mainstream 3.5GHz FDD market.
“picoChip is proud to be involved in this significant WiMAX milestone,” said Guillaume d’Eyssautier, President and CEO of picoChip. “Our engineers have worked closely with those at Airspan to help ensure success in this certification. Our WiMAX reference design is now a proven platform that provides a sure and speedy route to certification, and when we release the software upgrade to 16e our customers will instantly benefit from that.”
Jeremy Rowe, Vice President of Engineering at Airspan, added, “This is a significant achievement for us. The picoChip reference design helped us accelerate our development, and delivers the strategic advantage of a software upgradeable architecture. This allows us to easily add features, and to support both 16d and 16e from the same product.”
picoChip recently announced it had been selected by CETECOM to supply reference designs for the MINT T2230 protocol conformance tester for Mobile WiMAX testing. The CETECOM system is being used by the WiMAX Forum for certification and ‘plugfest’ interoperability testing for 16e.
Airspan’s MacroMAX is a software upgradeable, conventional high-performance macro cell basestation with support for two channel Transmit and Receive Diversity, and Uplink Sub-channelisation. In the 3.5GHz FDD certification profile, MacroMAX delivers up to +38dBm output power per channel, and Receiver Sensitivity of -101dBm.
picoChip provides software defined radio solutions to the key challenges of cost, development time and flexibility for the next generation of wireless systems. The company’s multi-core DSP architecture delivers a world-beating price/performance combination and has achieved design wins with numerous major companies. Uniquely, the company also delivers complete, standard-compliant reference designs for UMTS (HSDPA, upgradeable to HSUPA) and WiMAX/WiBRO (both 802.16d and 802.16e, with support for AAS and MIMO). WiMAX systems using picoChip are available from Airspan, Intel, Ericsson, Nortel, Marconi and a number of other manufacturers.