With LTE being seen as a major boost to the future success of femtocells, the joint testing of a reference design against the proposed LTE standard should help with its chances.
The joint testing has been conducted by picoChip, a U.K.-based femtocell silicon developer; mimoOn, a German-based SDR specialist; and the test equipment vendor Agilent Technologies. The objective behind the test was to verify that the femtocell reference design met the requirements of the LTE standard as measured by the recently developed 3GPP LTE modulation analysis option from Agilent.
picoChip and mimoOn, which have been co-operating on the reference design for the past 12 months, recently announced the availability of what they suggest are the first LTE femtocell and picocell reference designs, the PC8608 Home eNodeB and PC8618 eNodeB respectively. The design is based upon the same hardware platforms as picoChip's WiMAX products.
For more on this story:
- go to EE Times Germany
Related stories:
Qualcomm buys into femtocell developer. Qualcomm story
Femtocells--big market, bigger questions. Editorial on femtocell