Picocom wins 2022 Global Small Cell Forum Award for the industry’s first 5G small cell system-on-chip (SoC)

Hangzhou, China - June 2022 - Picocom, a provider of 5G small cell baseband chips and carrier-grade software, is pleased to announce that it has become the winner of the 2022 Global Small Cell Forum (SCF) Awards. Picocom received the award for "Outstanding Innovation in Small Cell Network Chips and Components" for its PC802 chip . The PC802 chip is the industry's first 4G/5G small cell system-on-chip (SoC) designed to meet standards including Open RAN.

“The adoption of open architectures to diversify the industry supply chain is a trend, and it is critical that this is happening at the chip level,” said Caroline Gabriel, chair of the SCF Awards jury and co-founder of Rethink Research. “The future will be about combining technological innovation with commercial value creation, and the PC802 will help achieve this goal.”

The Small Cell Forum (SCF) is a global membership organization dedicated to supporting agile, low-cost mobile infrastructure using small cells. Its vision is to promote cellular mobile network connectivity to organizations of all sizes, thereby supporting the digital transformation of different industries, enterprises and communities. SCF members are located all over the world, and are leading communications operators, equipment manufacturers, technology providers and related research institutions. Picocom is a senior member of the forum and has participated in the formulation of its widely influential FAPI interface specifications. Not long ago, SCF announced at its global summit that Picocom won the Outstanding Innovation Award for Small Cell Network Chips and Components.

"To achieve successful deployment, 5G small base stations clearly require a completely new architecture and optimized chips , and the PC802 SoC can meet this requirement," said Luo Wen, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Picochip Microelectronics (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd. "We are pleased to see the PC802 win this prestigious award, and we have received positive feedback from partners and customers about its technology and performance. Many customers are using the PC802 to develop their highly innovative 4G/5G small base station products, and we are very excited to provide a chip product and complete solution that can stimulate the vitality of the 5G small base station market."

PC802 is the industry's first 4G/5G small base station SoC designed specifically for 5G NR. It was launched in December 2021 and has been delivered to multiple customers. The device has powerful functions, optimized performance and high flexibility. It can support all important standard interfaces to help drive open networks. The inherent flexibility of the chip enables it to support a variety of application scenarios, thereby enabling small base stations with different networking structures, performance requirements, and meeting Open RAN standards.

Compared with the 5G small base station solution based on high-performance FPGA+CPU , the 5G small base station system based on PC802 has greatly reduced power consumption, BOM cost and development difficulty. At the same time, it can provide all physical layer (PHY) functions for multi-carrier, dual-mode NR/LTE small base stations in a single chip, thereby greatly reducing the capital expenditure and operation and maintenance costs of 5G small base station deployment, and providing solid support for small base station equipment developers and operators to provide customized 5G small base stations and communication services according to usage scenarios.

Picocom also recently announced that, through close collaboration with Radisys, the company has begun to provide customers with an Open RAN 5G small cell joint platform based on Picocom PC802 small cell SoC and Radisys Connect RAN 5G software.