picoChip recently announced it had publicly demonstrated its Modem, designed
to be WiMAX compliant, at the IEEE 802.16 Standards Committee meeting in Shenzen,
China. The end-to-end system is software based, and allows seamless upgrade to
the formal 802.16d specification, and all amendments. The same architecture is upgradeable
to802.16e for mobility. According to picoChip, the system delivers a complete
solution, enabling OEMs to accelerate their development of cost-effective
WiMAX-certifiedTM basestations and CPE.
Doug Pulley, co-founder and CTO of picoChip said while in Shenzen; “Our
architecture is very well suited to complex wireless, and delivering a software
defined 802.16d system shows this. We are proud to have had the opportunity to
demonstrate our WiMAX Modem: in effect, this is an 802.16 ‘chipset’ for
companies who need a system, but with the flexibility a conventional chipset can
never support.”
The picoChip WiMAX Modem is a ‘shrink-wrapped’ complete solution and
delivers high quality, advanced, carrier-class performance with a considerably
lower bill-of-materials than traditional DSP+FPGA architectures. It will support
802.16d, including OFDMA and scalable PHY. It also integrates a high performance
lower-MAC. There is optional support for MIMO, advanced FEC and smart antennas.
The system is suited to both basestations and high-end subscriber stations.
The system is software upgradeable and will accelerate market acceptance of
802.16 by enabling carriers to deploy with fixed (802.16d) and still maintain
the ability to upgrade to mobility (802.16e) and full WiMAX compliance
effortlessly at a later date.
According to the press release, the picoArrayTM
provides unprecedented flexibility to address evolving standards or the
introduction of new features, and it is straightforward to implement IEEE
802.16d (next generation fixed), 802.16e (mobility) and the Korean broadband
wireless standard Wibro (also called HPi). This includes trouble-free support
for TDD or FDD, increased channel bandwidths, larger FFT sizes, sub-channelisation
or new FEC-modes (turbo-code or LDPC). It also enables efficient use of multiple
antennas at high sample rates, critically important for advanced algorithms such
as adaptive antennas, space-time-coding (STC) and MIMO.
