Fabless semiconductor company Lime Microsystems has joined the Femto Forum, the independent industry and operator association that supports femtocell deployment worldwide. The Forum promotes the adoption of femtocell technologies through open standards, market education and ecosystem development.

Lime Microsystems’ technology is ideally suited to femtocells as its reconfigurable multi-band multi-standard transceiver allows a femtocell to be reconfigured quickly and simply, cutting cost and inventory for OEMs.

“We are delighted to announce that we have joined the Femto Forum," comments Ebrahim Bushehri, CEO of Lime Microsystems. "The widespread adoption of femtocells faces a multitude of issues and we are looking forward to helping resolve these issues and promote industry standardisation through the Forum’s working groups.”

“The femtocell industry is going through an exciting period as operators prepare for deployments. Critical to this success is the development of advanced silicon that is appropriate for the needs of femtocells,” said Simon Saunders, chairman of the Femto Forum. “We wholeheartedly welcome Lime Microsystems’ membership of the forum and very much look forward to their contributions to furthering this industry.”

Lime Microsystems will immediately participate in two of the Forum's working groups: the Marketing and Promotion working group and the Radio and Physical Layer working group. The Marketing and Promotion group looks at how the industry should best position femtocells within the industry and to the wider public, build usage cases, agree common terminology and manage any potential concerns. The Radio and Physical Layer group is developing standardised RF interfaces, clarifying the various capability classes of femtocell and examining interactions with outdoor cells.

The working groups' mission is to ensure the rapid and effective deployment of femtocells to support a wide variety of customer propositions and operator business models.

Lime Microsystems announced first silicon in April 2008. The company’s unique transceiver design can be digitally configured to operate in any required frequency band between 375 MHz and 4 GHz, with 16 user-selectable bandwidths up to 28 MHz. This means it can transmit and receive data across all WiMAX bands (including those used in different geographical areas), as well as those used for W-CDMA and HSPA, and those that are planned for LTE. This removes the need for individual transceiver chips for each of the different bands, and allows a femtocell to be reconfigured rapidly and simply.