Korean research focus on software defined radio

Stuart Corner
Monday, 19 September 2005 13:01

Business IT - Technology

A UK company, picoChip has signed a partnership agreement with the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) of Korea to work on software defined radio for the WCDMA/HSDPA standards and for WiMAX.

The arrangement takes the form of an engineering co-operation including joint development and research into future wireless technologies. As part of the agreement a team from ETRI will be based at picoChip's UK headquarters for a year.

Software defined radio (SDR) is seen as a key technology to enable future wireless systems to be built with the flexibility to adapt to different protocols and standards. For example, Airspan claims that its present, commercial WiMax gear operating on the established 802.16-2004 standard, will be software upgradeable to the yet-to-be-finalised 802.16e standard, because it uses SDR technology.

The Australian Government's largest ever R&D START grant, $12 million was awarded some years ago to a Melbourne company, Advanced Communications Technologies, on the strength of its claim that it could build a cellular base station to work across multiple standards by using SDR technology, but it was unable to deliver on this promise.

Dr Yim Chu-Hwan, president of ETRI, said, "For our software defined radio project we evaluated all the programmable architectures and selected picoChip on the basis of price-performance, flexibility and suitability for next generation wireless technologies.

Korea will be the first country to introduce true portable broadband when it launches WiBRO (mobile WiMAX) services next year. ETRI is the leading telecom research institute in Korea, and was responsible for drafting the WiBRO specification.

Nortel, which announced its WiMax plans last week is relying on its R&D joint venture with Korea's LG Electronics to help it build a marketing-leading position in WiMax, and WiBro.

picoChip claims that its processor, the PC102,"delivers world-beating price/performance and has achieved design wins with numerous major companies developing wireless infrastructure".

The company also claims to deliver complete, standard compliant reference designs for UMTS (including HSDPA, upgradeable to HSUPA) and WiMAX/WiBRO (802.16-2004 upgradeable to 802.16e for mobility). It says also that the PC102 is suited to the Chinese cellular standard, TD-SCDMA, and that it has customers developing systems for this standard.