picoChip joins the Femto Forum – a new body to promote femtocell standardization and deployment

Bath, England, 2 July 2007: - picoChip announced today that it has joined the Femto Forum, which will support and promote femtocell deployment worldwide. The Forum brings together the foremost femtocell equipment vendors with the major global mobile operators assessing the technology.
The Forum will promote the uptake of femtocell technologies through open standards, market education and ecosystem development. The initial focus will be on pre-competitive standards-focused issues including radio planning & control, device provisioning & management and device to network standardization. In addition, a marketing task force will promote the benefits of femtocell technology for both operators and subscribers.

“The cost-effective provision of ubiquitous mobile broadband services as well as managing the threat posed by non-traditional telecoms operators represent two of the greatest challenges facing mobile operators today,” said Simon Saunders, Chair of the Femto Forum. “The Femto Forum will illuminate precisely how femtocells meet these challenges as well as marshalling the respective equipment vendors and operators into creating the best possible solutions for the market.”
“As the early protagonist of femtocells picoChip is pleased to see other companies rallying for the cause,” said Guillaume d’Eyssautier, CEO and President at picoChip. “The femtocell concept has finally gained its own momentum and with the backing of the Femto Forum we can all steer it on a clear path to success.”

The Forum’s first Plenary will be held at the Home Access Point & In-building Conference in London 3-5 July 2007.

The Forum is an independent, not-for-profit membership organisation with founding members including Airvana, ipAccess, NETGEAR, picoChip, RadioFrame, Tatara and Ubiquisys.
picoChip is the only semiconductor company focussed on wireless infrastructure, and provides software-defined radio solutions to address 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 is the industry standard architecture for WiMAX basestations, and is the leading supplier for the new wave of femtocells (3G/4G access points). Uniquely, the company also delivers complete, standards-compliant reference designs for UMTS (HSDPA, upgradeable to HSUPA) and WiMAX/WiBro (both 802.16d and 802.16e, with support for AAS and MIMO). 802.16-based systems using picoChip are available from Airspan, Intel, Ericsson, M/A-Com, Marconi, Nortel and a number of other manufacturers. The company also has strategic relationships with ETRI and Korea Telecom in Korea and both ICT and WSPN-BUPT (Wireless Signal Processing & Network Lab, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications) in China. picoChip technology is also being used to develop other 4G wireless protocols such as UMTS-LTE, 802.20 and TD-SCDMA.
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Editor's Note: “picoArray” is a registered trademark of picoChip. All other trademarks and servicemarks are the property of their respective owners.

About picoChip
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.

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. This radically reduces both development time and materials cost and enables the strategic goal of the “Software Defined Radio”. The company has the most comprehensive reference designs in the industry, with complete, standard-compliant solutions for both UMTS (including HSxPA) and WiMAX (802.16d upgradeable to 802.16e).

http://www.picochip.com

About the Femto Forum
Femtocells are cellular access points that connect to a mobile operator’s network using residential DSL or cable broadband connections. The Femto Forum (www.femtoforum.org) has been set up to promote the wide-scale adoption of femtocells. The Forum will support and drive the adoption of industry wide standards and common architectures to enable the widespread adoption & deployment of femtocells by operators around the world. It will direct and implement a multi-faceted marketing campaign to raise the profile, drive technology development & deployment and to promote the potential of femto solutions among industry stakeholders, journalists, analysts, regulators, special interest groups, standards bodies and consumers.