LONDON — Wireless chip design specialist picoChip (Bath, England) is using this week's UK-China Business Summit and Prime Minster Brown's visit to China to tout availability of the first design the company has developed wholly at its Beijing design centre - a TD-SCDMA femtocell reference design.

Targeted at the local TD-SCDMA third generation standard, which is finally expected to launch in time for the Olympics this summer, the move means picoChip — the leading supplier of silicon designs for femtocells — now supports all three 3G standards families.

The company is involved in most of the current operator field trials in many parts of the world. Customers include ipAccess, Ubiquisys and other undisclosed leading manufacturers.

Femtocells (or 3G access points) are low-cost basestations optimized for deployment inside buildings to improve coverage and data rates.

Yang Hua, the secretary general of TD-SCDMA Industry Alliance, said :"Femtocells are an important part of the TD-SCDMA ecosystem, and an essential part of operator strategy, particularly as we evolve to TD-SCDMA LTE. picoChip's achievement significantly pushes the TD-SCDMA industry forward."

TD-SCDMA femtocells are expected to be deployed later than those working on W-CDMA, cdma2000 or mobile WiMAX specifications, but according to one analyst, Stuart Carlaw of ABI Research, will "ramp as fast if not faster than those for W-CDMA."

picoChip already has reference deigns for all other versions, including an HSPA version of the W-CDMA technology, and one for cdma2000 through its partnership with GWT. It also has designs for mobile WiMAX based femtocells.

The PC8808 TD-SCDMA femtocell reference design supports HSDPA and is said to be the industry’s lowest cost complete solution. The single-chip platform can integrate both Node B and protocol stack, and can easily integrate back into the core network using a number of different architectures including SIP, UMA or Iu.