What's the likely market for TD-SCDMA femtocells? picoChip obviously think there is one - they previously announced a reference design using their chipset. But will this standard be limited to China only, and does it justify additional consideration? 

TD-SCDMA is yet another radio interface variation included in the 3G standards, developed and promoted by China. China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile operator by subscribers, has been mandated to adopt it as their 3G standard. Many Chinese handset and equipment vendors have invested heavily, and there is a wide range of handsets developed and being used in large scale field trials in eight cities. It is a TDD rather than FDD interface and thus only needs one spectrum frequency range, which is shared alternately between uplink and downlink. This makes it easier to find a suitable frequency slot compared to FDD which requires a matched pair of frequency ranges, with one dedicated to uplink and the other for downlink. It also means the system can adapt to match asymetric traffic mixes, for example when watching video it can allocate more time to the downlink.

picoChip announced a TD-SCDMA chipset and femtocell reference design in January 2008.  This leading vendor of femtocell chipsets must believe there is a significant market to justify this investment.

At present, China is still a 2G mobile country, albeit a very large one. There exists three major systems: GSM (with over 300 million subscribers), CDMA (around 100 million) which also offers laptop data services via USB dongles and PHS (also around 100 million) which is really a cordless phone system developed in Japan and adopted by China Telecom. China Mobile are the largest operator with around 300M GSM only subscribers, China Unicom have both GSM and CDMA technologies – GSM being more popular largely due to lower cost and wider range of handsets. China Telecom operates the PHS systems. This structure is expected to be revised when the full set of 3G licences are issued.

Read on for China's Strategic Decision on 3G