picochip
mindspeed buys ‘small cells’ maker picochip for up to $ 76. 8 million – techcrunch
picochip was acquired by mindspeed in in 2012 for a price between $ 50 and $ 75 million .
raymond james & associates, inc. is acting as mindspeed’s financial advisor, and wilson sonsini goodrich & rosati, p. c. is serving as mindspeed’s legal advisor. barclays capital is acting as picochip’s financial advisor and fenwick & west llp is serving as picochip’s legal advisor .
mindspeed press relations contact: magnet pr group carolyn fromm, 949 - 651 - 9539 carolyn @ urltoken or mindspeed investor relations contact: mindspeed technologies, inc. andrea d. williams, 949 - 579 - 3111 andrea. williams @ urltoken or picochip media and analyst contact: eml wildfire darren willsher, + 44 20 8408 8000 picochip @ urltoken or picochip corporate contact: rupert baines, vp marketing + 44 1225 469 744 media @ urltoken
about picochip founded in 2000, picochip has developed the world’s highest performance dsp tuned for wireless, and is a supplier of complete reference designs for wimax and hsdpa. picochip technology is being used by intel in its glenfield system which is sold for use in wimax basestations, and airspan. airspan has recently won wimax contracts from ericsson, marconi and fujitsu. in addition, picochip has a number of strategic customers and partners for both wimax and 3g, including tier one manufacturers, and is fast becoming the industry standard for next - generation wireless infrastructure. the company recently won a place in this year’s prestigious
fierce 15
, recognising the fifteen most significant private companies in the wireless area. more information on picochip is available at urltoken .
together, mindspeed and picochip will offer the most comprehensive portfolio of base station semiconductor solutions on the market, from residential to enterprise to pico / metro applications .
mindspeed, a us - based supplier of chipsets for network technology solutions, purchased small cell technology developer picochip for $ 51. 8 million in cash and shares .
picochip, a semiconductor technology firm backed by intel, at & t; and samsung, has been acquired by semiconductor corporation mindspeed technologies for more than $ 50m .
the individual dsps used in all three devices are backward - compatible with those used in picochip' s pc102 device, which has been shipping in volume for over a year. this has enabled picochip' s customers to develop systems using pc102, and then benefit directly from the cost - savings provided by pc20x devices as soon as they are available .
will strauss of forward concepts commented ,
the industry is moving to multi - core processors and picochip is ahead of the game, already having volume shipments. few other manufacturers in the world can compare with what picochip is doing right now, and with 10 times the mips per dollar of traditional solutions the advance in price - performance points is simply stunning .
picochip, located in bath, england, is dedicated to providing innovative, flexible wireless solutions to help equipment makers minimize time - to - market, costs, and system power consumption .
however, while the deal valued picochip at $ 51. 8 together with further potential earnout of $ 25 million, the company has received private funding of $ 110 million since 2005 .
is paying $ 51. 8 million for picochip, a mix of cash and stock, and up to $ 25 million in earn - out payments in the first calendar quarter of 2013 .
picochip was an independent chipset design company founded in 2000 and based in bath, uk. a leading baseband chip vendor for femtocells, their reference designs formed the basis of many femtocell and small cell vendor products. their solutions replaced more costly dsp chips with an highly efficient array processing architecture. in 2012, mindspeed acquired picochip for a price between $ 50 and $ 75 million .
baines also believes the deal will allow some of picochip' s
back burner
ideas to be explored .
the transcede platform brings a lot of scope for moving some of our ideas up in scale ,
he told new electronics .
we' ll be able to do a lot of things that picochip wouldn' t have been able to do on its own .
picochip' s chipset is incorporated into 3g small cells from ip. access, alcatel - lucent, contela and many other vendors femtocell products, dominating the 3g hspa and td - scdma market .
bath - based femtocell specialist picochip has raised another $ 20m in equity funding on top of the $ 20m it raised last november. the company has raised $ 110m in ten years, and says it expects to be cashflow positive by the end of the year. the company' s existing investors put up the latest round of $ 20m, among them intel capital, pond ventures and samsung. the money is needed, says picochip, to expand its offices, take on new engineers and accelerate product development .
we are looking to expand our 150 headcount by 25 to 30 per cent. the great majority of this expansion will be in design engineering and applications engineering roles ,
said vice president for marketing rupert baines. picochip designs chips for use in femtocells – very small base stations that connect over domestic broadband. as that market expands, picochip needs more cash to increase its own growth rate. in the uk, only vodafone has embraced the femtocell concept, with its sure signal product featuring a picochip heart .
both companies hailed the agreement as one that will create a clear market leader in small cell base station solutions, although it appears picochip needs the expertise and scale of mindspeed to help make the transition to lte .
first arm powered, single - chip, software - defined solution for advanced wimax and wcdma applications bath, uk and cambridge, uk – sept. 20, 2005 - picochip and arm [ (lse: arm); (nasdaq: armhy) ] today announced that picochip’s next generation picoarray tm flexible products for wimax and wcdma infrastructure will incorporate the arm926ej - s™ processor, to create the first single - chip, software - defined solution for advanced wireless systems. combining arm® processor technology and picochip’s fully - programmable signal processing array in an advanced 90nm device significantly reduces the cost of wimax deployment without compromising the flexibility essential for standards compliance and system performance enhancement .
mindspeed technologies, a provider of semiconductor solutions for network infrastructure applications, this morning announced that it has acquired uk - based picochip, a supplier of integrated system - on - chip (soc) solutions for small cell base stations .
picochip currently has a development team with a balanced mix of hardware and software engineers of outstanding ability and experience; spanning such diverse fields as communications system design, software development, computer architecture, digital signal processing, rf design, and silicon design .
at the heart of the company' s offering is a scaleable, multi - processor baseband ic that combines the computational density of a dedicated asic with the programmability of a traditional high end digital signal processor. the picochip technology platform includes tools, development boards and reference designs, and proven ip for seamless integration with the radio frequency elements of a base station. equipment based on picochip technology will enable telecom operators to remotely re - configure and upgrade their equipment without the high costs of replacing obsolete hardware .
semiconductor technology manufacturer mindspeed technologies acquired picochip, a uk - based developer of semiconductor and signal processing mobile voice and data technology, on thursday, for $ 51. 8m with a $ 25m payout to potentially to come in the first quarter of 2013 .
picochip is enabling the next generation of wireless infrastructure. its picoxcell™ family of optimized silicon devices is the leader in the fast growing market for femtocell access points. its picoarray™ family of flexible wireless processors is the leading solution for ofdma - based network equipment, and is backed by comprehensive software support for global standards such as edge, hspa, hspa +, td - scdma, wimax, lte, cdma2000 and gsm. located in bath, uk and beijing, china, picochip is re - shaping mobile networks .
picochip provides software defined radio solutions to the key challenges of cost, development time and flexibility for the next generation of wireless systems. the company' s multi - core processors deliver a world - beating price / performance combination. picochip has achieved design wins with numerous major companies. uniquely, the company also delivers complete, standard - compliant reference designs for umts (hsdpa, upgradeable to hsupa) and wimax / wibro (both 802. 16d and 802. 16e, with support for aas and mimo). wimax systems using picochip are available from airspan, intel, ericsson, nortel, marconi and a number of other manufacturers. the pc102 picoarray is also being used to develop other advanced wireless protocols such as 802. 20 and td - scdma, and in 4g research .
intel was an early investor in picochip via its venture capital arm and was linked with a possible acquisition bid two years ago, before the uk firm was bought by mindspeed for $ 51. 8m in 2012. its second sale, for an undisclosed sum, should complete in february .
while picochip says it has achieved a dominant position in the 3g small cell market, according to its vice president of marketing rupert baines, the company was encountering problems transferring this growth in the lte sector. baines told mobile europe that the merger will allow the companies a product roadmap that includes multi - standard, arm - based, system on a chip products, combining 3g and lte technology on a single chip. he added that the deal was focused on combining picochip' s experience and expertise with mindspeed' s scale and depth of relationship with tier 1 oems .
all three chips feature a cryptographic engine, and optimized co - processors for fft / ifft, viterbi and turbo decoders (including ctc for 16e). this functionality is all integrated into picochip' s interconnect fabric and development environment, making it very easy to program, integrate and verify .
another significant aspect of the deal is that mindspeed / picochip was the only firm to produce small cell chips supporting china’s 3g standard, td - scdma, which gives intel another route into the world’s highest growth wireless market, where it is already forging close ties via its c - ran trials .
the picochip architecture delivers the most cost - effective way of implementing a flexible solution for any wireless system, with significantly better cost and power than legacy multiple combined dsp and fpga offerings. as we broaden the portfolio of picoarray products, we required a single - chip, cost - optimized 90nm offering for our high - volume customers ,
said guillaume d’eyssautier, ceo and president, picochip .
to integrate the control and media access controller (mac) functions, we chose the 90nm synthesizable arm processor because its area and power efficiency will enable us to continue our price and power leadership .
nigel toon, chief executive officer and president of picochip, stated, “mindspeed is the ideal acquirer for us. together, we have valuable technology and customer synergies, given picochip’s carrier - qualified 3g wireless technology leadership with over 70 percent market share in 3g / high - speed packet access (hspa) and mindspeed’s proven pathway as the long - term evolution (lte) small cell pioneer with the transcede® product family. our combined resources create one of the largest soc development groups in the wireless infrastructure sector with complementary intellectual property scale and expertise to deliver the solutions that this fast - moving market demands. ”
many of the early 3g umts femtocell designs were based on the pc202 and related chips. this continued to be used as a mainstay for rapid product development of new technologies due to its flexibility through software configuration. at the same time, picochip invested to specifically optimise the pc3xx series to meet the needs of lower cost femtocells .
the transaction has been approved by mindspeed’s and picochip’s boards of directors and is subject to certain closing conditions. the transaction is expected to close in the first calendar quarter of 2012. mindspeed currently expects the acquisition, inclusive of anticipated synergies, to be accretive to non - gaap earnings per share in the second half of calendar 2012 .
while qualcomm is, for now at least, staying at the edge, intel is unlikely to use its new picochip jewel to design a small cell soc itself, or at least, not in isolation. the expertise and phy layer engineering it will acquire could feed into several aspects of its newly unveiled mobile infrastructure strategy, which sees the giant aiming to push x86 everywhere for the hetnet and, in particular, the software defined network. here, intel can build on its existing strengths ‘ dominance of the server market; broad sdn roadmap including a switch platform; healthy offerings in some types of network processor; key acquisitions such as fulcrum in switch - chips and now picochip .
the arm architecture is widely used and respected throughout the wimax value chain ,
said mike inglis, evp, marketing, arm .
by incorporating the arm926ej - s processor in their next - generation solutions, picochip is not only providing their customers with a lower cost, bill of materials (bom) solution, but also a standardized software development platform for a fast path to wimax certification and productization .
arm and thumb are registered trademarks of arm limited. arm926ej and arm926ej - s are trademarks of arm limited. picoarray is a registered trademark of picochip. all other brands or product names are the property of their respective holders .
arm
is used to represent arm holdings plc; its operating company arm limited; and the regional subsidiaries arm inc. ; arm kk; arm korea ltd. ; arm taiwan; arm france sas; arm consulting (shanghai) co. ltd. ; arm belgium n. v. ; axys design automation inc. ; axys gmbh; arm embedded technologies pvt. ltd. ; and arm physical ip, inc. picoarray is a registered trademark of picochip .
wimax - certified
is a registered trademark of the wimax forum. all other trademarks and servicemarks are the property of their respective owners .
) - - mindspeed technologies, inc. (nasdaq: mspd), a leading supplier of semiconductor solutions for network infrastructure applications, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire u. k. - based picochip limited, a leading supplier of integrated system - on - chip (soc) solutions for small cell base stations, for a purchase price of approximately $ 51. 8 million, plus a potential earnout payment of up to $ 25 million payable in the first calendar quarter of 2013 .
picochip' s president and ceo, guillaume d' eyssautier, commented ,
customer adoption and business generated by the success of our current pc102 processor array have enabled us to invest in this new generation of products. since it went into volume production over a year ago, the pc102' s proven track record, combining outstanding performance with the highest mips / $ ratio on the market, has established it as the industry standard processor for wimax. we are confident that the pc20x family will build on this strong foundation and extend the company' s success into other application areas .
the new, cost - effective solution will enable carriers to build - out their infrastructure based on the current 802. 16d wimax standard, and quickly upgrade their equipment to support mobility once the new 802. 16e standard is complete. wimax implementations are power intensive and currently require increasing numbers of dsp or fpga devices, with a consequent escalation of costs. with the arm powered® picochip offering, carriers will be able to bring mobile wimax services online in the shortest time frame possible. this will enable customers to maximize the benefit from the wimax standard with ubiquitous broadband internet access and enhanced mobile multimedia services .
together, mindspeed and picochip will offer the most comprehensive portfolio of base station semiconductor solutions on the market, from residential to enterprise to pico / metro applications. through this timely combination, mindspeed' s enhanced product roadmap for single - and multi - mode 3g / 4g solutions will enable it to capitalize on the rapid acceleration of the small cell wireless base station market, while also addressing comprehensive support for all 3g and 4g global air interface standards. management estimates the total addressable market for the combined entity will grow to $ 3. 0 billion by 2016. management also believes technology synergies, operational synergies and opportunities for cross - selling products within each company’s customer base are substantial .
picochip has launched its next generation of picoarray multi - core processor arrays for next - generation wireless systems. the pc202, pc203 and pc205 are the first devices in the family, and are highly integrated, high - performance and extremely cost - effective dsps. while the three devices each have different performance and features, they all integrate around 200 or more individual processors onto each die and deliver over 100gips and 25gmacs - dramatically better performance than legacy single - core dsps. with pricing from just $ 25 in high volume, this achieves the' $ 1 per gmac' metric, enabling unprecedented performance at consumer price - points. the pc202 and 205 also integrate a powerful arm9 processor .
the ex - picochip assets could feed into various aspects of this plan, notably the next promised step, to produce the long awaited base station platform, built around a xeon accelerator optimized for signal processing. prototypes based on fpga chips are being used in china mobile’s huge cloud - ran market trial which, as price put it, aims to ‘create synergy from big cells serving thousands of users to small cells in metro areas of public networks’. intel has talked about producing a full base station offering, though to date it has mainly worked with partners to get x86 processors into cell site equipment, as seen in its alliances with nsn over the racs / liquid apps offering, and cisco / ubiquisys for the smart cell .
for picochip, mindspeed will pay cash of $ 27. 5 million and approximately 5. 19 million in new shares of mindspeed common stock, amounting to approximately 15 percent of outstanding mindspeed shares, for a total of $ 24. 3 million, based upon the closing price of mindspeed’s common stock on january 4, 2012. the cash portion of the initial purchase price will be financed in part with bank debt. the terms also include an earnout provision, whereby the purchase price can increase by up to $ 25 million, contingent on the achievement of certain milestones. the earnout, which is payable in the first calendar quarter of 2013, may be paid in cash, mindspeed common stock or a combination thereof, at mindspeed’s discretion .
mindspeed will conduct a conference call to discuss the proposed acquisition of picochip today, thursday, january 5, 2012, at 6 a. m. pacific time / 9 a. m. eastern time. to listen to the conference call via telephone, call 800 - 369 - 1935 (domestic) or 312 - 470 - 7420 (international); password: mindspeed. to listen via the internet, please visit the investors section of mindspeed' s web site at urltoken. replay of the conference call will be available via telephone for a period of 30 days beginning one hour after the conference call concludes by calling 800 - 947 - 6448 (domestic) or 203 - 369 - 3538 (international). replay will also be available in the investors section of mindspeed' s web site at urltoken during such 30 day period .
situations as fluid as this encourage m & a by defending incumbents and new entrants. most of the original small cell pioneers, who created platforms for low cost, low power femtocells ‘ architectures now being adapted for public access metrocells running on soc (system - on - chip) designs ‘ have now been snapped up. broadcom bought percello, qualcomm acquired fellow israeli firm designart, and mindspeed took over picochip. the last of these has now been sold again, this time to intel, where it will play a far more strategic role in the giant’s ambitious bid to push x86 into almost every link in the network, from c - ran servers to network processors to base stations (the rest of mindspeed has been acquired by macom for $ 272m, probably signalling the final end of a once - interesting development in small lte base stations) .
“our acquisition of picochip establishes our position as a global leader in wireless infrastructure semiconductor solutions for next generation mobile broadband communications, ” said raouf y. halim, chief executive officer of mindspeed. “it is a great strategic fit for several reasons. first, it positions mindspeed as the clear leader in small cell base station technology with the industry’s broadest small cell product offering, addressing a significantly expanded market opportunity of $ 3. 0 billion by 2016. second, it enhances our competitive position as we join our respective 3g / 4g technologies to offer single - and multi - mode solutions that we believe will provide us a time - to - market and product performance advantage relative to competitors. third, it gives us the scale to lead the industry’s move toward fixed / mobile broadband convergence; a trend which we believe will drive revenue and earnings growth for mindspeed in the future. ”
much of the analysis of the mobile chip industry in the past year has centered on devices, particularly whether intel could make atom a major force at last, or if anyone could unseat qualcomm. however, equally important changes have been happening on the wireless infrastructure front, where intel and qualcomm are both eager newcomers, and texas instruments and freescale are the incumbents in the base station. the final weeks of the year are seeing m & a activity in this space, with intel buying the small cell assets of mindspeed (formerly picochip) and avago snapping up lsi for its storage and wireless infrastructure offerings. these deals highlight important trends for 2014, particularly the expansion of generic silicon platforms into many previously separate engines of the ip data boom, from servers to base stations. and that super - trend will certainly drive further acquisitions next year ‘ some are even whispering of an intel bid for broadcom .
for now, the emergence of new architectures is opening doors to new players. small cells allow platforms originally developed for home equipment and devices, with their associated economics and ecosystem, to move into the carrier network, while cloud - ran and sdn (software defined network) provide opportunities for server silicon vendors to leap the divide from data center to network .
an interesting speculation is how far qualcomm will reach into the infrastructure sector it quit in 1999 (apart from some cdma products) when it settled its patents suit with ericsson and sold its network chip business to the swedish giant. it certainly won’t be selling whole base stations again, as it did in the 1990s, but it may have to remember some of the lessons of that episode. qualcomm was a failure in cdma networks because it had base station platforms but nothing for the switches, the area that made ericsson and others into powerhouses in the early digital days. now it is entering infrastructure again right at the edge, with chips and socs for small cells, wi - fi equipment and home gateways (courtesy of atheros). however, while there will be a premium in carrier small cells for a couple of years, the economics of the metrocell demand that it evolves quickly towards consumer - class costs and margins, in order to drive the huge quantities that will create the true hetnet. qualcomm understands consumer product margins and may choose to stay in familiar territory, adapting its device platforms for small - sized infrastructure and harnessing the advantages of coming from that angle (low power, highly integrated multimode and so on) .
of course, the firm has faltered many times before, buying and then discarding some useful assets (it sold its dialogic dsp unit to eicon in 2006, its atca board business to radisys in 2007 and, of course, its arm processor division, xscale, to marvell a year before that). it often sells a unit and then starts reinventing the wheel again, and it battles with its lack of expertise or track record in actual radio technology, despite device - side efforts such as centrino and the infineon wireless acquisition. however, the recent unveiling of highland forest by the head of intel’s infrastructure division, rose schooler, spoke of a new determination and confidence not to waste the first real upper hand intel has ever had in the mobile world ‘ the rise of virtualized networks and cloud - ran, where x86 has the edge .
‘this isn’t a strategy that started when sdn started to get attention, ’ schooler said on the conference call to launch highland forest. ‘we’ve been on this journey for a decade. we’ve been looking at the evolution for the intel architecture franchise within communications and redefined networking to boil it down into all of the infrastructure and workloads that support a network function. ’
this ambition is currently underpinned by various platforms which pair the xeon processor with a widening variety of companion chipsets – crystal forest for the data plane, jasper forest for the edge router, and so on. highland forest is intel’s third generation communications platform and the most aggressive in harnessing intel’s power in enterprise data centers to shift the economics of networking. it is based around the xeon e5 - 2600 v2 processor with the new coleto creek chipset, which is optimized for high end telco infrastructure, boasting the ability to process up to 255m packets per second .
this is part of a broader strategy to expand the platform, targeting four key areas of network infrastructure workload ‘ application processing, control plane processing, data plane packet transport, and signal processing. schooler says communications infrastructure is a $ 16bn business, when telcos, enterprises and cloud servers are considered, and intel has only 5% of that. it aims to increase the percentage dramatically with a processing and chipset platform to take networking equipment beyond ‘fixed function devices with customized silicon, towards more of a general purpose approach’. that pitches intel not just against broadcom but the habit of major vendors like cisco to use their own customized chips .
now it has certainly bought itself significant new expertise in this area. “the team and technology intel is acquiring will make important contributions to how intel architecture (ia) - based solutions are transforming wireless access within mobile network infrastructure, ” wrote schooler in a blog post. “our goal has always been to consolidate all four workloads to run on ia and we have already made significant steps towards enabling the last one – signal processing on intel - based servers – through collaboration with china mobile and skt on designing cloud ran technologies. ’
schooler also said, in an interview with eetimes, that the deal would help intel support baseband processing, including turbo n code and z code functions. “it has been a decade - long journey [ to support all comms workloads ] and this acquisition is one of the final building blocks, ’ she said. ‘one of the key gaps we wanted to close was in the area of wireless access, and that’s what this acquisition allows us to do. ’
in pushing a general purpose platform for all kinds of network functions, intel will be taking on specialized network processors, whether from vendors like broadcom, or custom, but also the entire arm ecosystem. it will have to battle arm on every front as the processor ip firm, with its powerful customers, brings its low power advantage into base stations, switches and cloud servers and seeks to make similar ‘one platform suits all’ arguments to those of intel. increasingly, indeed, it will work with the same providers of the specialized functions to surround the processor (intel and arm work with common partners in many parts of this market, from ceva for dsp cores to asocs for c - ran, and many others). however, arm is more embedded in the base station / signal processing field thanks to long - standing alliances with texas instruments and the femtocell makers, while intel has the incumbent position in servers (though, of course, arm - based platforms are starting to penetrate, especially for cloud servers) .
the arrival of 64 - bit arm platforms and significant interconnect technology highlighted arm’s determination ‘ backed by key partners like lsi, itself acquired this week, by avago ‘ to expand its offering to be truly infrastructure - class. in that battle, it is likely that powerpc, the incumbent platform in this area, will be squeezed out over time as the two more generic offerings become increasingly capable, although at the high end, the tougher battle for x86 and arm will be against dedicated custom architectures, like those used by cisco and others in heavy duty switches .
avago will reduce its exposure to the volatile wireless segments, which will become 25% , rather than 50% , of its sales, as well as becoming an overnight leader in enterprise storage as well as wireless infrastructure, positioning itself for the growing opportunities from the ip data boom. that boom needs to be targeted by a platform capable of serving diverse data handling products and even before the proposed merger, lsi had been working on an architecture which could be applied to nearly any element of the network .
its axxia 5500 family, introduced early this year, sports 16 arm cortex a15 cores, integrated with lsi’s networking accelerators and arm’s low latency corelink interconnect technology, on a single 28n chip. the resulting communication processors aim to accelerate performance and reduce power consumption throughout an lte or multiradio networks, including base stations, cell site routers, gateways and backhaul kit .
networking acceleration functions support packet processing up to 50gbps, 20gbps security processing and 160gbps of ethernet switching via 16 10gb ethernet interfaces. such capabilities are increasingly needed at the cell site as well as the back end in data - heavy networks, and lsi is paying more attention to bringing its capabilities to the base station, and supporting cells from small to large. lsi’s new chip offers the same key advantage claimed by ti and freescale for their platforms ‘ a modular but common architecture spanning macrocell to picocell .
‘mobile broadband growth is outpacing infrastructure capability, and service providers need solutions that will meet traffic performance needs while also minimizing cost and power consumption, ’ said jim anderson, general manager of lsi’s networking solutions group, at the launch. the firm added: ‘the combination of lsi’s networking expertise, specialized acceleration engines and virtual pipeline technology with arm’s power efficient processors and interconnect ip delivers communication processors that are uniquely suited for building intelligent, heterogeneous networks. ’
lsi has worked closely with arm over the past year and is a key partner in the uk firm’s bid to conquer the networking high end. this relies on a combination of new developments, all outlined last fall ‘ the move to 64 - bit processors with armv8, which will appear in commercial chips this year; the big. little architecture, which balances performance and energy efficiency using flexible combinations of high end and low power processors; and the corelink ip fabric. together, these make a robust story for the high end space, and one in which lsi has played a critical role courtesy of the corelink development .
this technology is important because it allows many combinations of cores and other system elements to be integrated in a scalable way, up to massively parallel arrays. for instance, arm recently showed off corelink with a memory controller targeted at networking and storage equipment. last october it unveiled two intellectual property blocks, thecorelink ccn - 504 interconnect (in effect an on - die network) and the corelink dmc - 520 dynamic memory controller. they work together, with the former providing the ‘glue’ to connect cores and cache components, within a chip and also to other system elements. the ccn - 504 can scale up from single - core cpus to four clusters of four cores each, meaning the common architecture can power infrastructure from small cells to macrocells to communications processors .
this is the kind of challenge which intel needs to meet quickly and effectively, since so many of the broad goals are the same. intel and the key arm backers are not pushing a different philosophy in this market, just a different architecture. both want to broaden their platform into as many products as possible which support the explosion of data traffic, as the industry moves towards more generic hardware to carry out all kinds of processing functions. that will inevitably lead to further m & a, since the winners will need skills, expertise and dedicated surrounding chips in a widening variety of function areas .
good news for innovative start - ups, but some are whispering that intel needs another really big acquisition to ensure its credibility in the networking area. one bold move would be a bid for broadcom itself, which is powerful in several of the areas where intel most wants to grow (the digital home as well as the network). that could be the superdeal of 2014 in semiconductors, and would certainly change the lines of competition significantly .
avago will pay $ 1bn in cash and use a $ 4. 6bn bank loan to fund the deal, while private equity firm silver lake partners, which helped acquire avago before its ipo in 2009, will provide a $ 1bn investment. the deal creates a business with about $ 5bn a year in combined revenue and $ 200m a year in potential cost savings. avago was originally a division of hewlett - packard, and was part of the agilent company which hp spun off in 2000. a group of private equity companies acquired it for $ 2. 66bn in 2005 and it went public in 2009 .
through this timely combination, mindspeed’s enhanced product roadmap for single - and multi - mode 3g / 4g solutions will enable it to capitalize on the rapid acceleration of the small cell wireless base station market, while also addressing comprehensive support for all 3g and 4g global air interface standards .
mindspeed says it will cough up $ 27. 5 million in cash, financed in part with bank debt, plus roughly 5. 19 million in shares (approximately 15 percent of outstanding mindspeed shares) for a total of $ 24. 3 million. the transaction is expected to close in the first calendar quarter of 2012 .
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picoxcell. specificially optimised chips for femtocells, the pc302 supports 4 concurrent users while the pc312 supports 8 .
picoarray. based on the original pc2xx series of chipsets, this provides flexibility for rapid development of new products, addressing all major standards including gsm, hspa, cdma and wimax but with a strong focus today on lte .
their pc202 baseband processor chips incorporated an incredible 308 processors each clocked at 160mhz. this technology is highly applicable to 3g and 4g femtocell requirements, providing enormous concurrent processor power at relatively low cost and size .
the company created a range of reference designs which could be adopted by femtocell manfacturers and incorporate related hardware and software components from a number of partners. these included a design for the chinese 3g td - scdma technology, which was adopted by the vast majority of vendors in that market .
for example, the pc8209 software reference design was a complete architecture for femtocell, supporting hspa using the pc302. the design was compliant with 3gpp release 5, supporting 4 simultaneous users and up to 7. 2mbit / s download and 1. 5mbit / s upload data speed. the design includes all baseband processing, mac layer and framing protocol functionality - in other words all the workhorse, processor intensive computing required for the application .
in 2008, announced an hspa reference design complemented by 3rd party software vendor continuous computing (now part of radisys) who provide the associated control plane processing (protocol stack software) required for a complete femtocell product. a standard interface to the rf chip allows freedom of choice from leading manufacturers including maxim, adi, lime microsystems and bitwave .
the company claimed their chipset could be software upgraded / adapted to process other radio interfaces, including gsm, wimax, lte, td - scdma and cdma2000 - demonstrations of several of these were available but not all are fully developed for commercial use .
read our comment on the acquisition and our interview with raouf halim, the ceo of mindspeed shortly after the deal completed .
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a significant number of users continue to report poor mobile coverage in their homes. there will always be areas which are uneconomic for mobile operator to reach. they range from rural areas
the term enterprise addresses any non - residential in - building including hotels, convention centres, transport hubs, offices, hospitals and retail outlets. it' s not just intended for businesses to
urban small cells (sometimes also named metrocells) are compact and discrete mobile phone basestations, unobstrusively located in urban areas. they can be mounted on lampposts, positioned on the
a rural small cell is a low power mobile phone base station designed to bring mobile phone service to small pockets of population in remote rural areas. these could be hamlets, small villages or
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for nearly six decades, we' ve been helping brands create breakthrough products and services that disrupt markets .
proud winners of multiple awards, we are the partner of choice for global blue chips, aspiring enterprises and ambitious start - ups alike .
hitachi came to us to help transform its innovation capability and shift its r & d activities towards market - driven, breakthrough innovation, drawing on our long and successful track record .
we set ourselves the challenge of creating a machine learning system that could address the infinitely complex world of music. the result is the aficionado .
for their latest wearable device, accesso wanted to take their loqueue virtual queuing solution to the next level, adding greater interactivity and creating new ways to connect with park guests during their visit .
we helped chiesi farmaceutici create a novel, next - generation dry powder inhaler (dpi) to compete with the market leaders throughout europe .
vinfusion is a personalised wine blending system that allows the user to design their perfect wine. vinfusion also makes wine recommendations based on the user’s tastes while collecting valuable market intelligence for the vendor .
the extremely fast polymerase chain reaction (pcr) device we developed has sped up the diagnosis of patients and helped our client maintain its leading position in the molecular diagnostics market .
using a fresh approach, we designed an energy efficient, future proof unit smart gas meter for one of europe’s largest engineering companies, optimised for mass manufacture and ease of installation .
nature doesn’t provide blueprints, which are why our robot system can cope with handling all kinds of different fruit – and can even sort red apples from green ones .
developing a realistic and achievable technology roadmap to deliver real end user value, for a market - leading supplier of photovoltaic panel mounting solutions .
harnessing the science of synthetic biology and best - in - class automation to turn organic waste into high - protein fish food .
all three products are programmed in standard c or assembler, making them suited to complete software radio systems, and full reference designs are available for wimax (both 16d and 16e) and wcdma (including hsdpa, with upgrade to hsupa) .
the pc202 integrates 198 individual dsps, as well as an arm 926ej - s for control and mac functionality, and is intended for cost - critical applications such as wimax client side systems and access points, and wcdma femtocells (home basestations) .
the pc203 has 248 individual processors and is designed for basestation (bs) applications where it can support popular wireless communication protocols such as wimax and hsdpa / hsupa, including support for advanced algorithms such as mimo and beamforming. it is used with an external control processor or network processor in large basestations .
like the pc203, the pc205 has 248 individual dsps, and in addition includes a powerful arm 926ej - s. it is intended for higher - performance stand - alone applications including software - defined radios and high - performance backhaul or mesh nodes. the arm processor is used for all higher mac and basestation control tasks, dramatically reducing bill - of - materials .
each individual processor is a fully - featured dsp, including a 16x16 - bit multiplier with 40 - bit accumulators, local instruction and data memory, and uses a modified three - way long instruction word (liw) architecture. this means that, for example, a processor can execute a multiply - accumulate (mac) instruction and up to three other instructions in the same cycle. with 248 processors in pc203 and pc205, all running at 160 mhz, this adds up to nearly 160 gips even before specialist wireless accelerators for functions such as turbo and viterbi decoding and cryptography are taken into account .
the company was founded in september 2000 and is backed by at & t; , sep, rothschild, intel capital, pond venture partners and atlas venture .
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wintergreen research announces that it has published a new study small cells and femtocells: market shares, strategy, and forecasts, worldwide, 2013 to 2019. the 2013 study has 413 pages, 162 tables and figures. worldwide markets are poised to achieve significant growth as small cell and femtocells and trucks permit users to implement automated driving .
small cells are better than base stations for expanding wireless infrastructure coverage in the ear of smart phones. wireless signals have incremental strength added locally in home, airport, or enterprise. small cells are able to offload traffic from the macro network to an underlay network at a street and indoor level. small cells work for individual subscribers, public places, and enterprises. small cells create a wireless signal transmission zone. a cluster of low - power access points are connected to a local controller. the quality of voice calls and data transmission is improved in a cost effective manner
small cells are units that address wireless services operator needs to continue to support of mix of 3g and 4g subscriber device generations and a mix of 3g and 4g technology within the same device. lte standards for data are well established but wireless devices, smart phones still use 3g for voice services, creating a need for 3g and 4g transmission capability .
delivery of voice services over lte networks has not been standardized yet. operators continue to deliver voice via their 3g networks even as they move data to lte. as a result, subscriber devices are a mix of 3g - only and 4g plus 3g, with very few 4g - only devices. to support these subscribers comprehensively across all types of mobile services, operators must deploy a multi - mode radio access infrastructure including multimode femtocells. multimode femtocells provide a cost effective solution to effectively support all user services. there are 3g microcells, picocells, femtocells, a mix of devices known as small cells .
the number of mobile internet users has surpassed desktop users as tablets erode the pc markets rapidly. video streaming and voip inflate traffic volumes by a factor of 1, 000 - fold by 2020. adding conventional base stations is and unaffordable way to handle this situation. operators are looking for cost - effective solutions to ease the pressure on their existing infrastructure .
the small cell and femtocell designs amalgamate a group of features generally found on macro base station installations to represent a local solution that is cheaper, faster, and better. these include the transmitters, the receivers, software middleware needed for a very local integrated approach to improving signal transmission for smart phones and tablets. significant investments in research and development are necessary as the emerging small cell and femtocells industry builds on incremental technology roll outs .
by 2019. market growth comes because there is no other way to build out wireless data infrastructure in an economical manner. the delivery of apps is anticipated to grow to a
, yes trillion dollar, market by 2019. this means a lot of data streaming around .
, principal author of the report ,
small cell market growth is a result of various moves toward autonomous miniature base stations that are used as boxes to improve cell phone transmission, particularly smart phone signal transmission from everywhere .
market driving forces relate primarily to the need for increased local signal strength. . services providers are positioning with various small cell and femtocell models to meet huge demand as the world moves to 8. 5 billion smart phones in use by 2019 and trillions of interconnected sensors on the internet of things. many small cell vendors are making inexpensive smart phone local transmission a reality .
wintergreen research is an independent research organization funded by the sale of market research studies all over the world and by the implementation of roi models that are used to calculate the total cost of ownership of equipment, services, and software. the company has 35 distributors worldwide, including global information info shop, market research. com, research and markets, electronics. ca, bloomberg, and thompson financial .
wintergreen research is positioned to help customers face challenges that define the modern enterprises. the increasingly global nature of science, technology and engineering is a reflection of the implementation of the globally integrated enterprise. customers trust wintergreen research to work alongside them to ensure the success of the participation in a particular market segment .
wintergreen research supports various market segment programs; provides trusted technical services to the marketing departments. it carries out accurate market share and forecast analysis services for a range of commercial and government customers globally. these are all vital market research support solutions requiring trust and integrity. this small cells and femtocells shipment analysis is based on consideration of the metrics for the number of smart phones shipped, percent of public places outfitted with small cells and femtocells, and probable market penetrations of macro base station numbers. experience using the small cells and femtocells is another factor that contributes to development of triangulation regarding market forecasts for the sector .
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picochip was a venture-backed fabless semiconductor company based in bath , england , founded in 2000 . in january 2012 picochip was acquired by mindspeed technologies , inc . the company was active in two areas , with two distinct product families . picochip was one of the first companies to start placing femtocells , mini cell base stations , in homes and offices . the femtocells help combat reception issues such as : dropped calls , poor sound quality , delays , and slow downloads . the idea is to help with the congestion of cell phone towers by allowing them to hold more cellphone traffic . the femtocell is very cost-effective , which is ideal because it makes connection free and does not interfere with other towers or frequencies . 
picochip was a venture-backed fabless semiconductor company based in bath, england, founded in 2000. in january 2012 picochip was acquired by mindspeed technologies, inc. the company was active in two areas, with two distinct product families. picochip was one of the first companies to start placing femtocells, mini cell base stations, in homes and offices. the femtocells help combat reception issues such as: dropped calls, poor sound quality, delays, and slow downloads. the idea is to help with the congestion of cell phone towers by allowing them to hold more cellphone traffic. the femtocell is very cost-effective, which is ideal because it makes connection free and does not interfere with other towers or frequencies.
picochip was a venture-backed fabless semiconductor company based in bath, england, founded in 2000. in january 2012 picochip was acquired by mindspeed technologies, inc. the company was active in two areas, with two distinct product families. picochip was one of the first companies to start placing femtocells, mini cell base stations, in homes and offices. the femtocells help combat reception issues such as: dropped calls, poor sound quality, delays, and slow downloads. the idea is to help with the congestion of cell phone towers by allowing them to hold more cellphone traffic. the femtocell is very cost-effective, which is ideal because it makes connection free and does not interfere with other towers or frequencies.