Freescale said it has started sampling its first chips in its system-on-a-chip baseband platform that will become a key part of Alcatel-Lucent's (NYSE:ALU) small-cell lightRadio technology.
However, the first chips of the architecture, called QorIQ Converge, will be targeted at the femtocell and picocell markets and will be multimode to support any combination of LTE, WiMAX, HSPA and CDMA. Freescale is sampling two chips that share basically the same design. One is configured for femtocells supporting 8 to 16 users and the other is for picocells supporting up to 100 simultaneous users.
Freescale isn't targeting the traditional femtocell market, however. It's banking on the fact that the femtocell will evolve into a piece of the heterogeneous network--the mixture of large and small cells that operators are expected to deploy.
Alca-Lu's lightRadio breaks down a base station into its component elements and then distributes them into both the antenna and throughout a cloud-like network. In addition, antennas serving 2G, 3G, and LTE systems are combined and shrunken into a single multi-frequency, multi-standard wideband active array antenna that can be mounted on poles, sides of buildings or anywhere else there is power and a broadband connection.
For more:
- see this release
- see this Connected Planet article
Special Report: Microcells, oDAS and picocells: Small-cell architecture to stem wireless data deluge
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