AirWalk Develops LTE Picocell with Mindspeed and Aricent

AirWalk Communications, a developer of IP CDMA Radio Access Network (IP-RAN) products, has announced its alliance with Mindspeed Technologies, Inc., a company that designs, develops and sells semiconductor solutions, and Aricent, a global technology and services company, to develop an LTE picocell.

Announcing their collaboration, the three companies will brief about the new Picocell base station at the CTIA Wireless 2010 conference and exhibition.

“As operators migrate their services to LTE and continue to expand network coverage, AirWalk is uniquely positioned to continue supplying the picocell and femtocell markets,” Serge Pequeux, president and chief executive officer at AirWalk Communications.

“The architecture specified by LTE standards bodies is the same flat all-IP architecture found in AirWalk’s CDMA products today, which provides an advantage in our development efforts and time-to-market,” Pequeux added.

AirWalk believes that its migration path to an LTE product line can offer operators with improved performance functionality through increased spectrum efficiency, increased capacity, peak data rates and very low latency.

AirWalk official clarified that the company will begin offering an LTE product line starting with picocells in 2011, followed by femtocells.

By incorporating Mindspeed’s Transcede next-generation wireless baseband processor and associated components, the 4G base station is said to combine the latest RISC processor technology with a high-performance DSP processing array in a single chip, providing a complete low-cost/high-value processing capability. It also is said to incorporate selected elements from the Aricent LTE eNodeB stack portfolio and includes the industry’s first Layer 2 stack for multi-core implementations.

'Mindspeed’s cost-effective industry-standard chipset has proven to help picocell manufacturers accelerate time-to-market for their LTE products,' Raouf Halim, chief executive officer at Mindspeed said.

Halim also mentioned that his company is pleased to collaborate with early adopter companies like AirWalk to bring the initial LTE products to market.

“Migrating toward LTE is a priority for the wireless industry, and Aricent is fully committed to offering exceptional solutions,” C.P. Murali, senior vice president, Communications Infrastructure Business Unit at Aricent said.