Last week Picochip held public demonstration of a commercial LTE femtocell eNodeB basestation working with terminals. The end-to-end system will be demonstrated at Picochip’s stand at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Picochip’s  is LTE basestation PC960x is designed for cost-effective ‘small cells’, and combines the company’s OFDMA expertise with its 3G femtocell experience.

The end-to-end small cell demonstration shows HD video streaming between two LTE-enabled laptops. It combines Picochip’s picoArray-based hardware and modem, Continuous Computing’s upper-layer software, and dongles (user equipment, or UE) using Wavesat’s Odyssey 9000 family of chipsets. Picochip’s PC960x crams a complete LTE basestation into a chassis barely larger than a hardback book, and is at the heart of the demonstration. It meets 3GPP standards for Home eNodeB and Local Area eNodeB.

The GSMA has shortlisted this system as a finalist in the GSMA Global Mobile Awards for MWC2011 in the Best Technology Breakthrough category.

“If initially most LTE operators will focus on the macro network, they will quickly have to consider new architectural approaches based on smaller cells”, said Julien Grivolas, Principal Analyst at Ovum. 

“For LTE to deliver on its potential, carriers must deliver high-speed data with a lot of capacity – and that requires small cells,” said Doug Pulley, Co-Founder and CTO at Picochip. 

Picochip’s PC960x eNodeB integrates radio, PHY and Continuous Computing protocol stacks into a complete system, with end-to-end testing and ‘carrier class’ quality. It supports all the standard modes of LTE up to Release 9, with both TD-LTE and FDD variants. Picochip has also announced dual-mode (LTE and HSPA+ in one platform) variants.