The five approaches to small cell chip design

19 January 2012

The proven need for small cells is creating a "battleground" for chip architectures, with competing System on Chip (SoC) vendors competing for victory in the small cell market, according to a report from In-Stat.

In-Stat said that there are multiple visions of small cell chip architectures with proponents competing for supremacy in a battle that, due to its forecast growth and size, is "worth waging".

In-Stat said that there are currently five approaches being used to power small cells, built around different SoC platforms.
These five are:
•    MIPS cores being used in residential femtocells, like those made by Broadcom and Cavium.
•    SoC vendors adapting existing mobile processors to meet the needs of femtocells. Qualcomm’s Femtocell Station Modem (FSM) is based on its Snapdragon platform, while Intel, in partnership with Ubiquisys, is developing Edge Cloud local cache processing using Atom cores.
•    ARM processors being used by several SoC providers: DesignArt, Mindspeed, Picochip (acquired by Mindspeed), and Texas Instruments are using ARM processors in combination with DSPs in their chipset designs.
•    x86 processors have had limited use in microcells and could become important in picocells. As HSPA and LTE platforms evolve into LTE-Advanced, greater computational power will be needed to process packets and signals over larger spectrum channels, which could be an opening for this architecture.
•    IBM’s Power Architecture is an emerging platform in the small cell market; Freescale has been the most vocal proponent.

In-Stat said that its research, Femtocells and Small Cells: Making the Most of Megahertz provides a review of which small cells serve best in a variety of coverage scenarios and includes five-year forecasts and analyses of shipment numbers, installed base, and the value of equipment in small cells. Breakouts and profiles are provided:
•    Forecasts by region, airlink, and mode
•    Forecasts by device type: femtocell, enterprise femtocell, indoor picocell, outdoor metro picocell, and microcell
•    Current small cell deployments categorized by region and small cell type
•    A silicon BOM for Class1 femtocells for the years 2009-2015