Femtocells apparently have a magnetic quality. They’ve pulled two companies, Continuous Computing and picoChip, into a partnership to speed the development of the on- premise mobile wireless base station technology and offer a step-saving reference design to newcomers entering the mobile space.
Continuous Computing contributed its femtocell protocol software while picoChip brought its own software and a single chip processor into the reference design which is on display at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
The combination “allows people to shorten their time to market and drives a lot of value to the converged device players who don’t have a lot of wireless expertise … people like NetGear and Thomson who are entering the market from residential gateway or DSL domains,” said Todd Mersch, senior product line manager at Continuous Computing. “It allows them to take this reference implementation and get started very quickly.”
The potential for femtocells to drive mobile broadband services into the consumer residence and psyche is causing an explosion of interest in the technology this year. That two seemingly disparate, perhaps even competitive companies are allying to attack this space with a merged reference design “signals how quickly this market is maturing,” said Mersch.
The combination of Continuous’ software and picoChip’s silicon essentially removes a step in the femtocell product development process with a reference design where the heavy lifting has already taken place.
“We’ve done performance testing. We’re demonstrating the support of HSDPA multiple voice calls, all the key requirements, parallel use of video while you’re doing voice calls while you’re doing downloads on the Internet. And we’ve fit the software into the picoChip design which is based on a processor which is only 200 MHz of processing capacity and very low memory,” Mersch said.
The partners expect there will be a market among the newcomers to the space who are practiced at home networking but have relatively little experience with the vagaries of mobile wireless.
“Wireless is a complex technology,” Mersch said. “That’s a big hurdle for these companies that don’t traditionally deal with 3G or cellular technologies. We focused a lot on the wireless part of this (and) it provides a lot of value towards the converged femtocell … where they can fill in that skill gap very quickly.”
By Jim Barthold via Femto glue: Continuous Computing and picoChip partner | February 11, 2008 | Telecommunications Online.
