picoChip’s PC8208/PC8209 reference designs provide the software and silicon OEMs need to develop a WCDMA (3G) femtocell with the lowest bill of materials and fastest time-to-market of any solution available today. Based on the PC202 picoArray multi-core processor, our reference designs are industry standards for 3G femtocells.

The PC8209 HSUPA (high speed uplink packet access) solution provides a modem that is fully compliant to 3GPP Release 6 (FDD) for four users with a 200m range, including 2ms TTI). It includes support for 7Mbit/s High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and uplink speeds of up to 1.46Mbit/s HSUPA.

Both the the PC8209 and PC8208 HSDPA designs implement all of the required baseband processing (including sample rate, chip rate and symbol rate operations), as well as MAC-hs scheduler, operations and management (OAM) functionality and protocol termination.

The designs are complemented by picoChip’s recently announced radio environment scanner (“sniffer” or network listen) products PC8210 and PC8211. These provide the femtocell with the fundamental measurement and reporting information needed for zero-touch provisioning and cell planning.

Because they are software-programmable solutions, all of picoChip’s reference designs can incorporate emerging technologies and adapt to changing standards specifications as markets evolve over time. Upcoming developments include a roadmap to HSPA+ and LTE.

The PC202 device integrates a picoArray multi-core signal processor that runs the modem software itself, an ARM9 core that executes control code and application stacks, and various application accelerators. picoChip’s next generation WCDMA femtocell device, the PC302, provides an entirely hardware-based, ASSP-style implementation of both the full modem and the sniffer software designs.