S3 and Percello Collaborate to Produce Latest Femtocell Baseband Processor

- Silicon & Software Ltd.(S3), a worldwide leading provider of semiconductor chip design services, today announced that they completed all of the Integrated Circuit(IC) implementation for Percello’s latest PRC6000 chipset. Percello, a UMTS/LTE femtocell SoC vendor, produce femtocell baseband processors and chose S3 because of their proven expertise and experience in delivering first-time-right designs. PRC6000 is the first worldwide SoC solution dedicated for the emerging 3G UMTS and HSPA+ femtocell market. As part of the collaboration S3 seamlessly dealt with all of the complex issues associated with very deep sub-micron SoC design such as 65nm, clock distribution, DDR2 and handoff to the foundry.

A femtocell is a small cellular base station, typically designed for use in residential or small business environments. The femtocell incorporates the functionality of a typical base station but extends it to allow a simpler, self contained deployment; an example is a UMTS femtocell containing a Node B and RNC with Ethernet for backhaul. Percello’s PRC6000 chip is a highly integrated device supporting all femtocell backhauling architectures and functions such as timing, security and others. PRC6000 is compliant to 3GPP HNB Rel-8 baseline, it supports 8 users simultaneously and is capable of delivering 21.6Mbps downlink and 5.76 Mbps uplink.

"Achieving a first-pass silicon success on such a highly complex SoC necessitates high expertise and special skills during the backend phase. S3 proved to be the perfect partner for taping out the PRC6000 in TSMC's 65nm CMOS." said Rafy Carmon, Vice President of R&D at Percello Ltd. "S3 committed to Percello's aggressive schedule and low-power low-cost silicon goals. We are very pleased with the cooperation and collaboration between the engineering teams which facilitated our very fast design cycle."

“Percello’s PRC6000 is the most advanced chipset for femtocell basebands currently available. S3 is proud to have been able to deliver the IC implementation first-time-right and ahead of schedule to enable Percello to get to market faster and continue to grow,” said James Blair, Director of, Consumer Silicon Services. “With a strong focus on performance and low power S3 offered Percello a one-stop shop solution to address all of their needs around this complex SoC design.”

About Percello

Percello, a fabless semiconductor company, was founded to provide digital baseband solutions to the challenges of the 3G/HSDPA/HSUPA/HSPA+/LTE femtocells market: cost, power, level of integration, development time and flexibility.
Percello team has vast knowledge in silicon design, software and 3G/HSDPA/HSUPA/HSPA+/LTE communication systems. The team has proven capability to deliver complicated SoC from standard to mass production.
Percello's architecture combines programmable multi processing DSPs and dedicated HW accelerators. This approach is optimized for power consumption, cost reduction and risk minimization. For more information about Percello, please visit www.percello.com.