Semiconductor company Cavium announced South Korea's SK Telecom and rival KT have selected its Octeon Fusion base-station-on-a-chip platform for use in large-scale commercial LTE small cell deployments.
Cavium said SK Telecom is planning "broad mass market deployment" of LTE small cells this year.
"We look forward to aggressively expanding both our subscriber base and our high-bandwidth data services with the rollout of cost-effective, feature-rich small cell solutions based on the Octeon Fusion platform," said Kang Jong-Ryeol, head of SK Telecom's network technology R&D center.
Cavium said KT will use its Octeon Fusion platform for "the first stage of commercial deployment" of LTE small cells.
Cavium's Octeon Fusion processors combine L2-L7 multi-core technology with programmable L1 baseband DSP cores and 3G/4G hardware accelerators plus front end (DFE) functionality in a single chip. Cavium offers two product lines--CNF71XX and CNF72XX--for small cell base stations supporting from 32 to 300-plus users on both LTE and 3G platforms. The Fusion platform is also designed to support a range of wireless and wired backhaul technologies including wireless LAN, microwave, gigabit Ethernet and fiber.
In October 2011, Cavium announced its Octeon Fusion family of chipsets for LTE and 3G small cell base stations, including picocell and micro base stations. Three months ago, Cavium confirmed initial shipments of Octeon Fusion SoC's to telecom equipment manufacturers.
SK Telecom announced last week that its LTE network had reached a milestone of 4 million customers, almost half of the 8.4 million LTE subscribers in South Korea, said Cellular-News.
Seoul-based ROA Consulting predicts that the number of LTE subscribers in South Korea will grow to about 15.9 million by year-end and will surpass the 40-million subscriber mark in 2013, according to a Korea Herald article.
For more:
- see this Cavium release and this release
- see this Cellular-News article
- see this Korea Herald article
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