PMC has announced a radio transceiver chipset for macro basestation designs which it says is the industry’s lowest power. The new UniTRX chipset replaces up to 14 discrete devices, and reduces both board space and power by more than 50% for equivalent multi-standard basestation radio designs, according to PMC. It addresses multi-standard macro basestation performance requirements and simplifies the design of dense MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) radio units, such as active antenna systems.
Swiss positioning and wireless chip and module company u-blox has acquired San Diego based Fusion Wireless, a provider of CDMA wireless modules for consumer and M2M applications in North America.
Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) has introduced four high-speed data converter products that support the signal sampling rates necessary to accommodate 3G/4G multi-carrier radio platform requirements. The new introductions include the AD6649 and AD6643 IF diversity receivers and AD9643 and AD9613 high-speed A/D converters. All the products complement other receive-chain components to simplify control loops and maximise base station receiver sensitivity and dynamic range, says ADI.
The number of newly deployed macro cellular basestations worldwide has grown by over 10% during 2009, according to a newly published report by analysts In-Stat. The basestation market is thriving despite the poor state of the worldwide economy, and is being driven by demand for mobile phones, especially smartphones, and wireless broadband services. macro cellular basestations will grow over 10% in 2009.
Lime Microsystems and picoChip are collaborating to develop a reference platform for 3G and 4G femtocells, which will be based on Lime's multi-band multi-standard RF transceiver IC, the LMS6002, alongside picoChip's picoXcell baseband solutions for femtocells.
This jointly-developed platform will enable femtocell designs based on 3G or 4G standards (WCDMA/HSPA, CDMA2000, LTE, and WiMAX). It will be configurable to operate in all frequency bands of interest, including existing and emerging bands, and is expected to accelerate the adoption of emerging standards and enable femtocell deployment using less common cellular frequencies – for instance at 700MHz or 1.5GHz.
