Mindspeed/Astri TD-LTE demo a first at MWC

MANHASSET, NY -- Mindspeed Technologies, Inc. and Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) are demonstrating what they claim is the industry’s first commercial-grade, production-ready time division long-term evolution (TD-LTE) small cell reference design.

“Unlike reference designs that use ‘example code’ or ‘demo-ware,’ this is a fully tested, verified and deployable carrier-class TD-LTE baseband system,” said Naser Adas, vice president and general manager, wireless and customer premises equipment (CPE), at Mindspeed.  “We appreciate the professionalism and skills of the ASTRI team in working with us to get this carrier-class product developed, tested and released.”

“We have been working closely with the company on this product since 2008,” added Cheung Nim-Kwan, chief executive officer of ASTRI, “This has been a very productive collaboration and we are delighted that Mindspeed has been able to make the LTE small cell system generally available to its customers. TD-LTE is important not just to the Chinese market, but globally, and we look forward to working together on future products.”

Picochip Ltd., which Mindspeed recently acquired, and ASTRI began their close collaboration on the LTE femtocell reference design in the middle of 2008, supporting both LTE frequency division duplexing (FDD) and TD-LTE.

The two companies demonstrated the world’s first TD-LTE femtocell prototype at Mobile World Congress 2009, and have been working on a combined design supporting both LTE FDD and TD-LTE over the last several years.

Demonstrations will be hosted in Mindspeed’s booth (1E57) at Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona this week where the TD-LTE small cell communicates with a commercial TD-LTE dongle for simultaneous uplink/downlink high data rate applications.

The USB modem was jointly designed by ASTRI and Innofidei, an IC design company in China, and had been recently used in a large scale TD-LTE trial conducted across six cities in China.

Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute was founded by the government in 2000 with the mission to enhance technological competitiveness of Hong Kong through applied research. Astri has transferred its technologies to its clients in the region.