Five chipsets in small cell shoot-out

Five processor-based chipset designs are battling for shares of the growing small cell basestation market, says market watcher In-Stat.

Small cells include femtocells that serve as few as 4 users and have an effective range of 15-50 meters (typically used in residences and small enterprises); picocells, used to provide coverage indoors and outdoors for up to 100 users; and microcells, used to support as many as 1,000 users and have an effective range of 2-3 kilometers.

This is potentially a boom market, with In-Stat forecasting that there will be 160.3 million active small cells, and the retail value of small cell shipments will reach $14bn by 2015.

The analyst has indentified five basic chipsets vying for dominance in this market market: MIPS, ARM, x86, IBM's Power Architecture and various mobile processors inclusing Qualcomm's Snapdragon. 

According to In-Stat, MIPS cores are being used in residential femtocells by Broadcom and Cavium. ARM processors are being used by several system-on-chip (SoC) firms including: DesignArt, Mindspeed, Picochip (acquired by Mindspeed) and Texas Instruments.

IBM’s Power Architecture is an emerging platform in the small cell market largely driven by Freescale.

Another approach is to adapt existing mobile processors for femtocells. Qualcomm’s Femtocell Station Modem (FSM) is based on its Snapdragon platform, while Intel, in partnership with Ubiquisys, is developing Edge Cloud local cache processing using Atom cores.

Finally, x86 processors have had limited use in microcells and could become important in picocells.