Maxim Integrated Products has shown its single chip RF front end for low cost femtocell basestation designs.
The company introduced its first integrated RFfront-end chipset for femtocells two years ago.
The MAX2557/MAX2597, a two chip WCDMA Band II and Band V femtocell basestation transceiver chipset.
It has now integrated the transmitter and receiver into one chip.
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Designed specifically for the femtocell market, the company sees a move to similar highly integrated RF devices to replace the traditional discrete designs in macro basestations.
"We believe there has been a mindshift in basestation market and designers are looking to deploy femtocell technology," said Vickram Vathulya, executive director of Maxim's RF business, at Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona.
"The lines between macrocell and femtocell will start to blur with the advent of the metrocell around LTE and this could have interesting implications on architecture choices.” said Vathulya.
The company has designed a proprietary high dynamic range PHY interface to eliminate the need for a mixed-signal analogue front-end and reduce component count.
There are four low-noise amplifier inputs to allow monitoring of WCDMA and GSM macro-network signals.
Richard Wilson, Barcelona