Taoglas Antenna Solutions has signed a distribution agreement with Mouser. The company’s M2M for ISM, cellular, and GPS antennas for external and embedded applications will be distributed by Mouser worldwide.
RF Micro Devices (RFMD) has announced that it has teamed with Silicon Laboratories to produce a reference design for a broad range of smart grid applications. The reference design gives developers an accelerated path to boost output power to 1W in a small form factor without sacrificing exceptional low-power operation.
Mindspeed is set to form a joint development lab with China Mobile to support the operator's recent deployment of TD-SCDMA femtocells.
“With close support and collaboration from chip vendors and infrastructure companies like Mindspeed, femtocell technologies in China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA network have achieved commercial deployment. This joint development brings a significantly improved customer experience and further demonstrates that small cells will play important roles in wireless broadband services,” said Gu Yihong, assistant general manager at China Mobile Jiangsu Suzhou Branch. “The convergence of TD-SCDMA, TDD-LTE, GSM and Wi-Fi is a fast evolving technology trend, and we appreciate TD-Femto ecosystem companies like Mindspeed that are driving this shift with mature solutions.”
“Mindspeed is delighted that China Mobile is deploying TD-SCDMA femtocell solutions in Suzhou using our technology,” said Raouf Y. Halim, chief executive officer at Mindspeed. “We believe an enhanced collaboration with the world’s leading operator in the TD-SCDMA/TD-LTE area will allow Mindspeed to deliver the best performance on next generation small cell solutions.”
Ubidyne will be showcasing its chip-based power amplifier solution for active antenna design at the LTE Summit later this month in Barcelona. Ubidyne’s new P-Chip is at the heart of its latest micro radio transceiver and delivers scalable output power solutions for both small-cell and macro-cell active antennas. According to Ubidyne, this means the same micro radio technology can be used for any size of mobile operator cell array and network standard.
At CTIA, TI and PureWave Networks announced that they collaborated on the PureWave Constellation, a family of LTE small cell base stations designed to handle up to 1Gbps of data traffic. The base stations use TI’s KeyStone-based wireless infrastructure SoCs.
The KeyStone-based wireless infrastructure SoCs are powered by production quality 3GPP compliant LTE PHY software, based on TI’s field-proven wireless application specific libraries. They also include a full portfolio of complementary analog products such as data converters, RF products, clocks, amplifiers, SWIFT DC/DC high-density converters and other power management products, which complete the integrated solution for small cell developers, reducing system cost and development time.
Freescale’s new reference design for small office/home office (SOHO) base station applications is partially powered by two advanced GaAs monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs). The baseband-to-antenna reference design combines the QorIQ Qonverge BSC9131 base station system-on-chip (SoC) with Freescale RF radio boards, and is a multi-protocol solution that scales across a range of cellular bands to ease developers’ transition from 3G to 4G LTE. Sourcing the base station SoC and RF devices from the same vendor speeds time to market and helps ensure optimal compatibility and integration.
Black Sand has been selected to provide silicon PA technology for integrated RF front end products by Murata. The products will be used to increase integration and improve the performance of 3G smartphones, tablets and datacards.
The agreement will combine Murata’s cellular RF front-end technologies with Black Sand’s CMOS PA technology; the companies hope to deliver a winning combination of performance and cost. Integrating the PA together with other RF front-end components into a single module will enable better optimisation of performance, battery current, size, and cost.
Mindspeed is claiming an industry first with its reference design for enterprise and public access TD-SCDMA small cells. Combining Mindspeed's Comcerto C1000 CPE processor and PC205 baseband with the PC8818 software, the new 16-user reference design will provide small cell coverage to the world's largest mobile market. Mindspeed says it is currently the only SoC company to offer TD-SCDMA small cell solutions and now has a total of seven customers in China.
Maxim has introduced a family of femtocell transceivers that can operate WCDMA (bands 1 to 6 and 8 to 10) or CDMA2000 (band class 0, 1 and 10). The MAX2550 family is intended to reduce the number of external components, lower operation and maintenance costs and reduce the size of radio designs for modules and standalone femtocell applications.
The first LTE femtocell from SK Telesys is powered by Mindspeed’s Transcede wireless baseband processors. The Wi-Fi integrated LTE femtocells will be first deployed in densely populated regions in South Korea, focusing primarily on the commercial centres of major cities. The rollout will then be expanded to areas with high data demand based on an analysis of LTE service usage patterns.
