Company’s Solutions Being Leveraged in Personal Base Stations for Homes and Small Offices that Enhance Coverage
Woburn, Mass., August 11, 2010—Skyworks Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:SWKS), an innovator of high reliability analog and mixed signal semiconductors enabling a broad range of end markets, today announced that Samsung is leveraging several of its solutions for its newest femtocell offering, including Verizon’s Wireless Network Extender. Samsung’s latest offering, the new code division multiple access (CDMA) plug-and-play personal base station, or femtocell, for homes or small offices, provides customers with enhanced cellular coverage, helping to eliminate “dead spots”. It also reduces the need for a landline given its ability to manage up to three calls simultaneously with a fourth channel reserved for emergency 911 calls.
Femtocell base stations improve 3G cell phone coverage inside buildings or homes by working with users’ existing 3G mobile phones to provide secure, cellular service over existing broadband networks. Acting as a wireless router, the femtocell provides access to the cell phone carrier's network for multiple devices within a building. With some carrier networks straining to keep up with the demands of increasing numbers of users surfing the Web from their smart phones, femtocells are being viewed as a cost-efficient means to improve the quality of service by making more bandwidth available to support data and video applications.
According to a March 2010 iSuppli study, femtocells are “headed toward critical mass among all major nodes of the wireless supply chain and will vault into explosive growth after reaching a decisive watershed this year.” In April 2010, Infonetics Research estimated that femtocell shipments would top 2.5 million units in 2011 and that sales of fixed mobile convergence devices and femtocells would grow at an 86 percent compound annual growth rate from 2009 to 2014.
“Skyworks is delighted to be supporting Samsung with our full suite of femtocell solutions,” said Liam K. Griffin, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Skyworks. “Our highly integrated dual band transceiver chipset enables femtocell designers to develop cost-effective, high-performance RF-to-baseband solutions, meeting the growing demand for network capacity driven by the mobile Internet phenomenon.”
About Skyworks’ Dual Band Transceiver Chipset
• The SKY65170-11 and SKY65171-11 are fully matched 0.5 watt (W) power amplifiers (PAs), both contained in 6 x 6 millimeter (mm) multi-chip modules (MCMs) that include all of the active bias and RF matching circuits. Both devices include internal power detection and operate from a single 5 volt (V) supply and can be shut down via a control pin. Designed specifically for femtocell applications, the devices provide ACPR <-51dBc at 18dBm while drawing less than 300mA.
• The SKY74068-21 is a highly integrated transmitter for dual-band CDMA femtocells supporting 1X-RTT and EV-DO modes in the cellular and personal communication system (PCS) bands. Packaged in a 5 x 5 mm land-grid array (LGA) is a chip that includes the baseband filter, direct upconversion in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) mixers, variable gain PA drivers, a fully integrated voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with local oscillator (LO) generation blocks, and a dual-mode fractional-N/integer-N phase-locked loop (PLL).
• The SKY74092-11 is a low-noise amplifier (LNA) for dual-band CDMA femtocells supporting 1X-RTT and EV-DO modes in the cellular and PCS bands. The 3 x 3 mm LGA device provides low noise amplification with high linearity to achieve high dynamic range. Different modes, currents and gain steps of low noise amplification are controlled by a serial three-wire bus interface.
• The SKY74100-21 is a highly integrated tri-band receiver for CDMA femtocells supporting 1X-RTT and EV-DO modes in the cellular and PCS. Packaged in a 6 x 6 mm LGA is a chip that includes the down-converters, baseband filters with an auto-tuning loop, ultra high frequency (UHF) VCO, RF PLL, and DC offset correction (DCOC). The chip also integrates a full receive chain for GPS including LNA, mixer and baseband filters.
These devices require a minimal number of external components to complete a CDMA radio subsystem for femtocell applications and are all commercially available today from Skyworks. For more information visit the company’s website by clicking the link below our logo on this page.
