Mindspeed and ASTRI demo first commercial-grade TD-LTE small cell reference design

Mobile World Congress 2012, NEWPORT BEACH, USA & HONG KONG: Mindspeed Technologies Inc. and Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) announced that the companies will demonstrate the industry’s first commercial-grade, production-ready time division long-term evolution (TD-LTE) small cell reference design at Mobile World Congress 2012 in booth 1E.57 at the Fira Montjuïc in Barcelona, Spain, from Feb. 27 to March 1, 2012.

Picochip Ltd., which Mindspeed recently acquired, and ASTRI began their close collaboration on the LTE femtocell reference design in the middle of 2008, supporting both LTE frequency division duplexing (FDD) and TD-LTE. The two companies demonstrated the world’s first TD-LTE femtocell prototype at Mobile World Congress 2009, and have been working on a combined design supporting both LTE FDD and TD-LTE over the last several years.

Mindspeed is the only small cell System-on-Chip (SoC) supplier to have demonstrated solutions for both TD-LTE and LTE FDD. The company also supports dual-mode concurrent operation with 3G high-speed packet access (HSPA+) and including time division synchronous code division multiple access (TD-SCDMA). Although TD-LTE had low visibility and demand just two or three years ago, industry analyst firm Informa has projected that 40 percent of LTE users will be served by the technology by 2015.

While the TD-LTE and LTE FDD are substantially similar, the key difference is that LTE FDD uses paired spectrum, with one band for the uplink and a second for the downlink. TD-LTE, instead, uses unpaired spectrum, carrying uplink and downlink traffic on the same frequency by switching between the two.

“Unlike reference designs that use ‘example code’ or ‘demo-ware,’ this is a fully tested, verified and deployable carrier-class TD-LTE baseband system,” said Dr. Naser Adas, VP and GM, wireless and customer premises equipment (CPE), at Mindspeed. “As the leading supplier of SoCs to the small cell industry, we’ve won more 3G and 4G customer designs than any other supplier. Mindspeed has extensive experience deploying high volume systems that rely on the quality and robustness of our PHY code – including delivering our 3G software across more than one million units in the field to-date. We appreciate the professionalism and skills of the ASTRI team in working with us to get this carrier-class product developed, tested and released.”

“We have been working closely with the company on this product since 2008,” added Dr. Cheung Nim-Kwan, CEO of ASTRI. “This has been a very productive collaboration and we are delighted that Mindspeed has been able to make the LTE small cell system generally available to its customers. TD-LTE is important not just to the Chinese market, but globally, and we look forward to working together on future products.”