Picochip develops Radio Environment Scanners

The PC8210, PC8211 and PC8810 Radio Environment Scanners (RESs) enable femtocells to detect WCDMA, GSM and TD-SCDMA networks respectively.

A 'sniffer', or 'network listen', capability is essential to automate the tasks of cell planning, synchronisation and handover within networks.

Such functionality also enables the implementation of the self-organising network (SON) techniques that will underlay the operation of future networks, and can be used to support timing and synchronisation.

Specific techniques to perform the necessary interference management and self-configuration tasks are being developed by infrastructure OEMs and may include intellectual property in the form of algorithms or other computational techniques.

However, all of these algorithms require the fundamental measurement and reporting of information enabled by these Picochip products.

The Picochip software enables femtocells based on the company's chips to run the manufacturer-specific code for SON or cognitive radio that automatically manages self-configuration and on-going self-optimisation tasks.

Until now, realising these features in a basestation would have required a complete handset baseband chipset and radio: this is replaced by software in the Picochip solution, reducing overall femtocell cost.

The PC8210, PC8810 and PC8211 reference designs perform cell search and decode automatically to implement self configuration and automate provisioning.

In an all-3G context, they also enable handover between a femtocell and adjacent cells.

Moreover, as users move in and out of range in a mixed 2G/3G network, the PC8211 (GSM) reference design enables hand off between a 3G femtocell and adjacent GSM basestations.

All three software reference designs target the Picochip PC202 single chip femtocell device.

In addition, the WCDMA RES capability is integrated into the hardware of the PC3XX system-on-chip products.

The PC8211 GSM RES reference design also targets the PC203, PC205 and PC302 devices.