Femtocells (News - Alert), or small cell base stations, will play important roles in wireless broadband services. Small cell base stations such as micro and pico base stations are required to offload the ever increasing mobile data traffic.

Recently Mindspeed Technologies, which provides technology for small cell base stations, formed a partnership with China Mobile (News - Alert) Communications Corporation to support the operator's recent deployment of Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA) femtocells.

“This joint development brings a significantly improved customer experience and further demonstrates that small cells will play important roles in wireless broadband services," said Gu Yihong, assistant general manager at China Mobile Jiangsu Suzhou Branch, in a statement.

China Mobile will leverage Mindspeed's System-on-Chip (SoC) to power its small cell base stations. Mindspeed 's Transcede family of processors is complete NodeB and eNodeB SoC solutions. They support concurrent 3G and long-term evolution (LTE (News - Alert)) processing in a single device, including TD-SCDMA, wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA), evolved high-speed packet access (HSPA+) and both frequency division duplexing LTE (FDD-LTE) and time-division duplex long-term evolution (TDD-LTE) with a roadmap to LTE-Advanced (LTE-A).

These technologies help the Chinese operator commercially deploy its TD-SCDMA network. By combining 3G and LTE processing capabilities into a single chip, the solution provides a more cost-effective option for OEMs. The inclusion of carrier-class physical-layer (PHY) software solution for both 3G and LTE will help accelerate time to market, while simplifying development and reducing risk.

"The convergence of TD-SCDMA, TDD-LTE, GSM and Wi-Fi is a fast evolving technology trend, and we appreciate TD-Femto ecosystem companies like Mindspeed that are driving this shift with mature solutions," Yihong added.

"Mindspeed is delighted that China Mobile is deploying TD-SCDMA femtocell solutions in Suzhou using our technology," said Raouf Y. Halim, chief executive officer at Mindspeed, in a statement. "We believe an enhanced collaboration with the world's leading operator in the TD-SCDMA/TD-LTE area will allow Mindspeed to deliver the best performance on next generation small cell solutions."

Recently Ben Ansell, Nokia (News - Alert) Siemen’s head of small cells marketing and a subject matter expert in the small cells space, told TMCnet that with the help of LTE, which was designed for overlapping cells, the small cells can work collaboratively over LTE, eliminating the interference that would happen with femto or picocells that are primarily used in scenarios that require less significant capacity like in homes. Read the full article here.