Having some competition in the femtocell IC market comes as a relief to picoChip, which invented and named the genre.
“Two years ago it was like being in an empty restaurant,” picoChip vp Rupert Baines told EW, “we were thinking: ‘Why does no one want to be in our space?’ It used to worry our VCs that there weren’t any other people in this business.”
Now that they have competitors like Qualcomm and Broadcom, how does it feel? “We can live with people playing catch-up in a market with 200% annual growth,” replied Baines.
picoChip has got its second generation chip in production for Metro-Femtos where femtocells are used to provide primary data coverage in a particular area – usually rural.
The new chip allows for 64 simultaneous users, with 400 smartphone users doing background functions like texting, and supporting a bandwidth of 42Mps.
Vodafone and Softbank are both putting Metro-Femtos in rural areas. Unit volumes are low compared to domestic femtocell usage. Baines puts total femtocell units at 60m in 2015 with the other 10% split between Metro-Femto, public access and enterprise.
“picoChip is the leading supplier of Metro-Femto,” said Baines, “we’ve got a lot of IP and some really good customers. If we don’t drop the ball that’s a good place to start from. If you’re an operator, then doing Metro with us is a no-brainer.”
The other big part of picoChip is its Wimax operation.
“It’s not the future of the company,” said Baines, “in 2009 it was half of our revenues, and last year it was 30% and, as femtocells take off, the Wimax percentage will continue shrinking.”
Still there’s plenty of life in the technology
“Rumours of the demise of Wimax are exaggerated,” said Baines, “it’s not going to set the world on fire, but it’s a nice niche, and we’re doing well in that niche.”
Countries installing Wimax are Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia.
“Japan is still interested in Wimax, the whole market is growing at 20% to 30% a year, and the chips are on 90nm processes – it’s a cash cow,” said Baines who shows a soft spot for the technology by adding: “Going from Wimax to LTE will be like going from CDMA 2000 to GSM.”