Femtocell hardware reference design cuts BOM to less than $50

Based on the company's PC3xx picoXcell family of femtocell devices, picoChip says the PC7300 cuts the bill of materials to less than $50 and requires less than 5W total power, making it the only femtocell solution on the market capable of being integrated into gateway devices. Rupert Baines (pictured), picoChip's vp of Marketing, said that the market has matured to the point that ODMs need a complete hardware reference design optimised to address cost and power. "With the PC7300, picoChip is helping developers to deliver the lowest cost, complete femtocell products and to bring them to market as quickly as possible," he said. "Our partners can base their product on the proven, manufacturable, low cost platform to implement their own, picoChip or third party software, and focus their effort on product differentiation. Femtocells are addressing an increasingly wide range of applications, from coverage problems to solving the 'data deluge' with mobile offload. As such, forward looking manufacturers are now looking at options of integrating value added femtocell functions into other devices such as home gateways and the PC7300 is ideal for these opportunities." Baines forecasts that there will soon be a variety of form factors emerging for femtocells – for instance approaches like USB – and picoChip will have reference designs to support those too." picoChip and Agilent recently announced a collaboration to deliver rapid calibration and verification testing capabilities for original design manufacturers and contract manufacturers. The jointly developed test solution is based on picoChip's picoXcell semiconductors and PC6201 software and Agilent's N7310A chipset software. The PC7300 integrates all of the hardware required to implement a four or eight-user residential femtocell, from antenna to backhaul. It includes the pcb and associated schematics and layout, populated with a picoXcell baseband processor, memory, rf circuitry and passive components.