MUNICH, Germany &151; Picochip has announced the availability of what it claims to be the industry's first LTE femtocell and picocell reference designs. The platform could speed the LTE trials presently under way and the time to market for LTE equipment once the standard definition is completed.

The LTE platforms, dubbed PC8606 Home eNodeB for the femtocell and PC86186 eNodeB for the picocell design, run on the same hardware platform as the company's WiMAX base station reference design and support the same 5MHz and 10MHz RF channel bandwidth, offering a data rate of 15 Mbit/s and up to 20 Mbit/s respectively, picoChip COO Peter Clayton explained. The picocell is designed for indoor use and at a minor extend for outdoor networks with a transmitting range of about 500 meters while the femtocells aim solely at in-house use with a range of less than 50 meters.

With the platform, the vendor aims at telecommunication equipment vendors such as Ericsson or Motorola who could use them for trials and later for volume products, effectively speeding time to market for the new wireless networking technologies.

The reference designs use picoChip and Wintegra hardware and have been developed with partners mimoOn and Wintegra. While the LTE standard is not yet fully defined and the industry currently is in trials with alpha network versions, picoChip expects more mature wireless networks to be available beginning end of 2009 and early 2010, Clayton said.