Lime Microsystems, the Guildford configurable wireless IC specialist, has got its first chips back from the foundry and is preparing to announce product this month.
Lime’s first chip is a reconfigurable transceiver which fits between the power amplifier and the baseband processor. It can handle frequencies from 400MHz to 4GHz.
“We’ve received the chip back from the fab, and it’s functioning correctly, and we expect to be on-track to announce a product in the next few weeks. Today the spec is not completely finalised,” Philippe Roux, vice president of business development at Lime, told EW.
Once the spec is finished, the chips will be sampled. Roux expects that to be “in the next few weeks”. Asked about volume availability, he replied: “By the end of the year we will definitely be on the market.”
The chip is can transmit and receive data across all WiMAX bands, as well as those used for W-CDMA and HSPA, and those that are planned for LTE. This removes the need for individual transceiver chips for each of the different bands, and allows a small basestation to be reconfigured rapidly and simply.
Customers are the manufacturers, and the femtocell and picocell people. The zero-IF transceiver has six user-selectable channel bandwidths from 1.5MHz to 14MHz and can be digitally configured to operate in bands from 2 to 4GHz. It uses 12-bit baseband ADCs and DACs, a 40MHz sampling rate and its serial RapidIO interface supports a throughput of up to 3.125Gbit/s.
Lime has been working with Freescale on the baseband side. “We’ve also been talking to other baseband manufacturers, including PicoChip”, said Roux.
Lime is not disclosing the name of the foundry for its SiGe/CMOS chip.