The availability of purpose-designed transceiver silicon that meets femtocells’ requirements in terms of interference, dynamic range, gain control and frequency agility is critical to the widespread deployment of femtocell technology, said Ebrahim Bushehri, chief executive officer of Lime. The LMS6002 not only meets these requirements, it also offers considerable cost and inventory savings for OEMs.
The new transceiver can be digitally configured to operate in full range of the frequency bands, with 16 user-selectable bandwidths of up to 28MHz. Hence it can transmit and receive the data across all WCDMA and the CDMA bands, and also those used or planned for WiMAX and LTE. This removes need for individual transceiver chips for each of different bands, and enables a small cell base station to be reconfigured rapidly and simply. The resulting reduction in the bill of materials minimizes costs and inventory for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
The company has announced the first silicon for this device in April 2008. Since then, the device has been through the important evaluation phase with the key customers, which has enabled the company to add the needed features and optimize the new transceiver’s performance. Hence LMS6002 is a second generation device.
The new LMS6002 now includes a multiplicity of RF inputs and outputs to allow features like GSM Listen Mode needed for femtocell operation. The new LMS6002 has a standard Serial Port Interface (SPI) for the programming and has provision for a full calibration function. Fine tuning has resulted in the additional performance optimizations which should enable OEMs to use fewer peripheral components, further reducing the bill of materials and the costs for femtocells.
The new LMS6002 is packaged in 9x9mm 116-pin DQFN package, and is available with an evaluation board and related software.
