Picocom has first 50 production wafers running through TSMC
Author: EIS Release Date: Dec 9, 2022
Picocom, the O-RAN baseband processor supplier which won Start-Up of the Year at Electronics Weekly’s Elektra Awards on Wednesday, has got its first 50 production wafers currently running through a TSMC fab.
“Our first two production lots – 50 wafers – are running through TSMC,” Picocom CEO Peter Claydon (pictured) told EW, “they’re O-RAN baseband processing ICs for 4G and 5G.”
The chips, being made on a 12nm process at TSMC, were designed three and a half years ago.
“We’ve got 29 paying customers,” added Claydon, “that’ll be 30 before the New Year.”
The advent of custom silicon is giving O-RAN a shot in the arm. “There was an expectation that things would happen quicker using FPGAs,” said Claydon, “but FPGA doesn’t hit the price points of custom designed silicon – now that custom designed silicon is being adopted, it makes O-RAN competitive. O-RAN needs its own chips to be competitive with the incumbents.”
“In small cell networks, O-RAN is about to become mainstream,” said Claydon, “part of the O-RAN concept was splitting the base-station into component parts, now people are saying do it with small cell and put everything back in one box.”
Asked if Ericsson and Nokia – previously suppliers of end-to-end total systems – were accepting the disaggregated new world of O-RAN, Claydon replied: “If you see things going in a certain direction that’s where you go – software, integration, services – you can make a lot of money out of that. Ericsson and Nokia can be system integrators – they don’t need to make everything themselves.”
The next thing for Picocom is, said Claydon: “A device in mid-2023 that is an optimisation of what we’ve got at the moment.”
In the open market, the only competition for Picocom is Qualcomm. “The Scandinavians are doing ASICs for their own products but they’re not selling them to the market,” said Claydon, “we provide more flexibility than Qualcomm and they’re our only competitor.”