Full (Mind)speed ahead

Mindspeed has acquired Picochip the Bath based company who produce SoC designs for 3G femtocells and LTE cells using software defined radios.

The deal is worth up to $76.8m ($27.8m in cash now with another $25m is the company meets various milestones by 2013). This valuation may seem low as the company has been the leader in 3G femtocell reference designs, but they are coming under heavy competition from big players such as Broadcom and Qualcomm.

All 150 employees should survive the transition to the new owners.

Qualcomm introduces new powerline and WiFi chips

Qualcomm (or to be exact Qualcomm Atheros) has announced severel new chips including the AR7420 which is Homeplug AV compliant and supports up to 500Mb/s wire speed over standard home electrical mains wiring. The chip uses frequencies from 2 MHz to 68 MHz (which may annoy a few ham radio enthusiasts). There's also a companion chip the AR1540 which is a line driver supporting multiple countries.

Also announced is a high performance WiFi system on chip (SoC) known as the AR9580 in co-operation with Mindspeed Technologies which incorporates Qualcomm's 802.11n multi stream WiFi chip in conjunction with Mindspeeds's Comcerto® 1000 broadband packet processors giving 1Gb/s bandwidth suitable for video over WiFi (VoW) solutions. The SoC is suitable for OEMs and end-user designs.

EDIMAX have launched a wireless access point known as the WV-A900APN based on the AR950 suitable for VoW solutions.