Mannerisms

"The volume for WCDMA home base stations is very low, a few hundred pieces, but we expect deployment to start this year and, by the end of Q4, a few tens of thousands to be installed and, next year, a few million", says Guillaume d'Eyssautier, CEO of PicoChip.

PicoChip has developed inexpensive baseband processors for very low-cost femtocell base stations that can be installed in the home. These femtocells have the potential to reduce the demand for cellphones that include Wi-Fi, which many in the cellphone industry believe will emerge in high volumes over the next several years to support the convergence of fixed and mobile communications.

The reason for the fast developing market is simple. "Operators have to go into this market or lose it to WiFi", said d'Eyssautier, "30 to 40 per cent of cellular calls in Europe are made from home, in the US it's 50 per cent, and in China it's 60 per cent."

"At the moment a home basestation is more expensive than a WiFi hotspot, but operators will subsidise base stations to get them into homes and protect their market", adds d'Eyssautier.

"We believe that femtocells will attract wireless operators and consumers alike", says Chris Taylor, director of the RF & Wireless Component service of analysts Strategy Analytics, "however, the bill of materials for femtocells will have to fall close to that of cellphones that include Wi-Fi chipsets for femtocells to really take off." .

PicoChip has recently brought out a HSUPA femtocell reference design for home base stations, the first company to do so.

"Analysts are saying that, by 2011, there'll be 17m base stations in homes in Europe and 80m worldwide, not counting China, so the overall should be even bigger, maybe 100m by 2011", says d'Eyssautier.