Lime Microsystems’ IC is a femtocell transceiver for the multiple air interfaces and frequencies which operates with cellular network standards incorporating WiMAX, 3G and LTE, reducing costs and inventory for global original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Femtocell is a technology that allows wireless phone use in homes and offices to become a practical alternative to conventional landline telephones, and solves the indoor coverage issues with the 3G indoor licensed spectrum, offering more capacity, coverage and services at home. It also decreases operating and infrastructure expenses with the seamless handover residential IP network backhaul. The market for the femtocells is anticipated to grow from $434 million in 2009 to $9 billion by 2014.
The flexibility of transceiver is important to the makers of femtocells and the small cell basestations. Lime Microsystems’ highly frequency agile transceiver operates at the user-selectable frequencies from 375MHz to 4GHz, with 16 user-selectable bandwidths up to 28MHz.
Our aim was to design an extremely innovative transceiver that meets the critical requirements for widespread adoption of femtocell technology. Jazz’s SiGe BiCMOS technology and expertise in modeling enabled us to integrate high levels of functionality into our leading-edge product,” stated Ebrahim Bushehri, chief executive officer of Lime Microsystems. “We are excited to introduce this advanced wireless multi-band, multi-standard RF transceiver IC to customers at Mobile World Congress 2009.”
“Jazz is delighted to participate with a technology leader such as Lime Microsystems in this new market opportunity that leverages our high performance, 150GHz, 0.18-micron SiGe technology (SBC18). While SBC18 is a mature platform in use for cell phone transceivers, optical data networks and TV tuners amongst other applications, it continues to be the technology of choice for innovative products that require advanced analog and RF performance while remaining in a cost-effective technology node,” stated Marco Racanelli, senior vice president and general manager of RF and High-Performance Analog at Jazz Semiconductor.
