Octasic expanding into wireless arena to address need for faster 2G base stations

Montreal chip developer Octasic Inc. is leveraging its experience in the voice and video media gateway market to expand into the wireless base station sector. The move, which was announced today, comes as carriers in many parts of the world are looking for speed increases and Octasic can give it to them by improving legacy second-generation wireless equipment through chip-level enhancements. Emmanuel Gresset, VP of the newly formed software defined radio (SDR) development group, tells Report on Wireless that media gateways are in some ways very similar to base stations so the move to broaden the company's core competencies into wireless was a natural extension. He notes though that Octasic is only involved in the baseband processor side of base stations - not the full wireless capability. The company plans to unveil its first product aimed at the GSM/EDGE base station market at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month. Based on Octasic's core Opus technology the baseband digital signal processor (DSP) is ideally suited for the smallest base stations such as femtocells used for internal signal boosting as well as the large macro base stations used by mobile carriers. In addition, the product will feature very high efficiency with low power requirements. "We were able to actually take that to high efficiency DSPs and get 3X improvement over our competitors in both power and efficiency," Gresset explains. The first iteration of the wireless DSP will be targeted at the mid-market with medium processing power, he says. This type of equipment, Gresset notes, will be for carriers in "developing countries that don't want to invest in new infrastructure for 3G but want to leverage their 2G infrastructure." There will also be other versions of Octasic's DSPs. Their high processing power allows the company to develop for larger and smaller parts of the base station market, meaning future versions will be able to address the broad market through software. "We will be coming out with other devices later this year and next year to address both high end, very high performance, higher number of cores DSP engine for the 3G, 4G truly SDR base stations and also with a very low cost, all integrated device for the femtocells and possible picocells, (and) the indoor for the enterprise and consumer type of indoor access points," says Gresset. Despite focusing on yesterday's technology as a jumping off point for its wireless product initiative, Gresset is convinced Octasic made the right choice. Every year since 2000 when analysts began predicting a decrease in GSM base station shipments, volumes actually increased, according to the Octasic executive. "Even though it's an old technology that should have been replaced already by 3G and 4G, it's still increasing in volume," Gresset says. " still the largest technology being used worldwide and volume wise it's still the largest number of base stations being sold. So the numbers are still very high and we believe with the lower power and lower cost we can actually get pretty good sales in the market." A recent report from In-Stat notes that growth of GSM base stations will remain strong resulting from significant growth in India, Africa and China. As well, cellular demand in China and India "keep sales of GSM base stations strong for many years."

Octasic expanding into wireless arena to address need for faster 2G base stations

News | 01/12/2009 8:47 pm EST

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