The companies plan to demonstrate the platform, which shares many commonalities with WiMAX designs, at next week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

The deal is not exclusive to either company and both are working with others on WiMAX and LTE designs.

The jointly developed reference design, which both picoChip and MimoOn will sell, supports the full range of eNodes from femtocells to multi-sector macrocells and is supported on the same common hardware platforms as picoChip's WiMAX products.

According to Rupert Baines, VP for marketing at picoChip (Bath, England), MimoOn brings its sophisticated and advanced MIMO IP and architectures to the partnership to link with picoChip's expertise in OFDMA technologies.

Baines added picoChip is working with several OEMs on LTE designs. "But it's early days for this architecture. We, and I think most of the industry, are shooting for advanced products in 2009 and deployments beginning in 2010."

The PC86xx builds on picoChip's success as the industry standard WiMAX reference design, and both standards can run on the same common hardware (picoChip PHY plus Wintegra MAC) platforms.

"The cellular world playing field has opened up with the transition to 4G and the battle lines for suppliers have never been more complex. Cellular giants have accelerated LTE at breakneck speed to shut out competing OFDM formats," said Caroline Gabriel, Research Director, Rethink Research. "But WiMAX has shown how new entrants have become credible suppliers even to top tier operators. Some had believed LTE would be less open, but the introduction of such a reference design and common platform will enable many competitors. The industry aristocrats need be concerned - the revolution has begun."

As in WiMAX, the PCs6xx range includes PHY and MAC, and scales from single-chip femtocell access points to sophisticated multi-sector carrier macrocells from 1.25MHz to 20MHz. Both TDD and FDD modes are supported. The PHY runs on picoChip PC203 devices and includes OFDMA downlink and SC-FDM uplink, with support for up to 4x4 MIMO and for AAS. The MAC, running on a Wintegra WinPath2 device, includes PDCP, RLC, GTP, ROHC, ciphering / deciphering and RLC, including ARQ.

"For such a powerful device, the picoArray is a dream to develop on," said Thomas Kaiser, CEO, MimoOn. "Designing with such an efficient architecture represents a sheer step in the ease of software integration and product development. As such, we have been able to deliver a very versatile, very flexible LTE solution to meet the needs of manufacturers."