An Israeli chip design company focussed on baseband chipset for 3G UMTS femtocells.
A startup business in its infancy in 2008, the company is targetting availability in mass production by 1H 2009. The company is reported to have around 15 staff as of April 2008.
The PRC6000 is the first of their Aquilo chipset family, and is claimed to support all variants of the femtocell architecture including UMA, Iu/Iub over IP and SIP/IMS.
The company licenced the MIPS32 24kc Core baseband processing technology in July 2008 and the Ceva-Teaklite-III DSP technology in September 2008.
The chipset is incorporated into Ubiquisys G3 femtocell, providing rates of up to 21 Mbit/s downlink and 5Mbit/s uplink speeds for up to 8 concurrent users/sessions. A higher capacity version based on the PRC6500 chipset is designed for up to 16 concurrent users/sessions.
In February 2010, the company announced their Quito reference design which scales to a capacity of 32 concurrent users/sessions each running at up to 21Mbit/s.
The company also has plans for an LTE chipset (named the PRC7000) which would achieve data rates up to 150Mbit/s for dozens of users. The roadmap also includes the PRC9000 - a combined HSPA/LTE chipset combining the capacity and features of both HSPA and LTE.
In October 2010, Broadcom acquired Percello for $86 million. The current management team will continue to run the business as before, but benefit from the support, financial muscle and distribution arms of a multi-billion dollar business. We interviewed Greg Fischer, Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's Broadband Carrier Access line of business, into whom the new subsiduary will report.
