picoChip Designs says that it has announced the availability of the industry's first software reference design for 3G basestations. The "basestation on a CD" includes tested algorithms and source code for WCDMA FDD, providing manufacturers with a speedy, cost-competitive and low risk route to develop a fully compliant "carrier class" 3G basestation.

Current development times for a basestation can be up to 24 months or more, with budgets of many tens of millions of Dollars: this solution makes it possible to reduce these by up to 50%. In addition to manufacturers it is ideally suited to operators, system development houses and research organisations wishing to test out new features.

CTO & Co-founder, Doug Pulley, said, "The interest in our "ready to go" basestation has been quite remarkable. We can now supply OEM customers with a complete WCDMA software reference design, fully compliant and tested. Our software-defined basestation removes the need to worry about obsolescence, interoperability or being trapped into out-dated standards - while reducing system cost and bill of materials. What is more, because this is a software-based platform, customers retain the crucial ability to add proprietary elements, to use their own algorithms and to include their own IP."

The hardware is based around picoChip's technology platform of picoArray devices. The system is capable of supporting the full set of 3G voice, data and video services. The system complies with Release 4.2.0 (Sept 2001) of the standard (the most common revision for current deployment and for interoperability with handsets) and has been fully tested to TS25.215 and TS25.104. Support for Release 5 (including HSDPA) is now under development for release later this year. Versions are available for both macro-cells and micro-cells.

Pulley, added, "This is the first in a series of system level products that includes different protocols and 3G test equipment. Future releases include HSDPA, TD-SCDMA and 802.20. Our aim is to provide operators and manufacturers with significant time to market benefits across a broad range of infrastructure platforms