Airwalk Communications, Mindspeed Technologies, and Lime Microsystems have joined together and developed a Long Term Evolution (LTE) small cell product to be on display in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress this week.

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Due to the unique wideband nature of LTE, throughput decline often occurs at macrocell edges. Small cells like picocells and metrocells are a solution for providing full coverage and capacity. Heavy data traffic hot spots tend to unbalance the macrocell coverage, and small cells provide an effective means for the data offload. To support the exponential growth of in-building data usage, residential femtocells and enterprise femtocells are being deployed to extend the network inside buildings that are RF challenged.

These three companies have all used their individual expertise to come together to develop the LTE small cell product. AirWalk is an expert in small cells with a broad portfolio of IP-based products including femtocells, enterprise femtocells and picocells. Mindspeed’s Transcede system-on-a-chip (SoC) processors offer highly integrated and cost-effective application-specific solutions with low-power requirements and complex processing capabilities. Lime Microsystems offers unique wideband multi-standard transceiver technology enabling the deployment of high performance, cost effective code division multiple access (CDMA), wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) and LTE (time division duplex and frequency division duplex, or TDD and FDD) small cell basestations.

“The market demand for LTE is growing exponentially due to the popularity of mobile video and data applications, making LTE small cell solutions essential to provide data off-load and coverage improvements as operators migrate from 3G towards LTE,” said Chris Osborn, CTO at AirWalk Communications.  “Working closely with the teams at Mindspeed and Lime has enabled us to introduce the most advanced LTE small cell solution available.”

The LTE small cell technology is planned to be extended into a complete portfolio of products over the next few years. The introductory product supports the 700-MHz band, utilizes 500-mW power output, accommodates up to 200 simultaneous users, and supports the S1 packet core network interface.

AirWalk Communications

Mindspeed Technologies

Lime Microsystems

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