picoChip is an independent chipset design company founded in 2000 and based in Bath, UK. They are the leading baseband chip vendor for femtocells, having created reference designs which are incorporated into many femtocell vendor designs. Their products replace more costly DSP chips with an highly efficient array processing architecture. picoChip chipsets are also used in several WiMAX basestation products and GSM picocells.

Many of the early femtocell designs were based on the PC202 and related chips. This is still used as a mainstay for rapid product development of new technologies due to its flexibility through software configuration. Meanwhile, picoChip have specifically optimised the PC3xx series to meet the needs of lower cost femtocells.

picoChip enable very small cells through two product lines:

• picoXcell. Specificially optimised chips for femtocells, the PC302 supports 4 concurrent users while the PC312 supports 8.
• picoArray. Based on the original PC2xx series of chipsets, this provides flexibility for rapid development of new products, addressing all major standards including GSM, HSPA, CDMA and WiMAX but with a strong focus today on LTE.

Their PC202 baseband processor chips incorporates an incredible 308 processors each clocked at 160Mhz. This technology is highly applicable to 3G and 4G femtocell requirements, providing enormous concurrent processor power at relatively low cost and size.

The company have created a range of reference designs which can be adopted by femtocell manfacturers and incorporate related hardware and software components from a number of partners.

The PC8209 software reference design is a complete architecture for femtocell, supporting HSPA using the PC302. The design is compliant with 3GPP release 5, supporting 4 simultaneous users and up to 7.2Mbit/s download and 1.5Mbit/s upload data speed. The design includes all baseband processing, MAC layer and framing protocol functionality - in other words all the workhorse, processor intensive computing required for the application.

Announced that the design is complemented by 3rd party software vendors Continuous Computing who provide the associated control plane  processing required for a complete femtocell product. A standard interface to the RF chip allows freedom of choice from leading manufacturers including Maxim, ADI, Lime Microsystems and Bitwave.

The company claims their chipset can be software upgraded/adapted to process other radio interfaces, including GSM, WiMax, LTE, TD-SCDMA and cdma2000 - demonstrations of several of these are available but not all are fully developed for commercial use as yet.

picoChip's chipset is incorporated into Ubiquisys , ip.access, Alcatel-Lucent and many other vendors femtocell products today.

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