Applications

• Overview
• Handsets
• Femtocells
• Other

Overview

Wireless devices have become omnipresent in both business and the home. The explosive growth of these devices has resulted in a plethora of networks, frequency bands of operation and wireless communication protocols. Creating trend-setting wireless devices is not a simple matter for designers.

What users would like is for device designers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and network providers to flatten the hierarchy of networks and devices which confront the users in today's world. Users want to take advantage of the broad set of applications available to them, but want a simple and transparent platform to connect to those applications. The OEMs challenge is therefore to provide low cost, easy-to-provision, portable devices and infrastructure with technology which satisfies consumer's ever-growing need for quality anywhere, anytime, any network connectivity.

To meet this need, designers have had to rely upon designs which used multiple radio transceivers to connect to mulitple frequency bands and wireless protocols of operation. BitWave's Softransceiver™ RFIC Platforms can provide a programmable foundation for current and future wireless devices which simplifies hardware design and allow network providers and OEMs alike to focus on new wireless devices, new applications, and new services which truly satisfy their customers.

Benefits

• Accelerating Time to Market

  New wireless devices and applications often require new RF transceiver designs. Design and fabrication of new transceiver often require several years and many hardware development engineers. In contrast to this, programming a Softransceiver RFIC for a new application requires far less time and engineering effort. Thus, Softransceiver RFICs can significantly reduce new wireless products time to market.

• Reducing Bill of Material and Cost

  The Softransceiver RFIC is a single chip which replaces several fixed RF transceiver chips in a traditional wireless device design. Additionally, since a single Softransceiver RFIC can tune across multiple bands, it requires less RF Front End (RFFE) components than the traditional design. Thus the Softransceiver saves on both BoM components and on the cost of the manufactured device.

• Reduced Size

  One 7mm x 7mm Softransceiver RFIC can replace the fixed function traditional transceivers required to support today's multiband devices and applications. This results in a significant board area savings which becomes progressively larger as the number of frequency bands and protocols required by the wireless device grows.