US : Optichron announced that the company has demonstrated initial compliance with the provisional new 3GPP specifications for multi-carrier GSM base stations (MC-GSM BTS), using their current generation of proprietary digital nonlinear signal processing components.

Inset is Perry Constantine, chief executive officer of Optichron quoted below.

Per the draft measurement methodology and specifications, the company has demonstrated a functional, corrected 4-carrier GSM platform that meets all performance requirements while yielding final stage efficiency of 32%, thus comfortably meeting market expectations. The platform uses Optichron's digital pre-distortion (DPD) and crest factor reduction (CFR) technologies, with existing RF components, converters, and power transistors. Six- and 8-carrier configurations using Optichron's DPD technology can also meet the draft requirement at slightly lower efficiencies.

Optichron, working with partners, will make available in the second half of 2008 an optimized reference platform for the development of production-ready MC-GSM BTS. The company will make a presentation on MC-GSM solutions on April 22 at the Next Generation Networks & Basestations event, April 22-25, Bath, UK.

"This early milestone achievement clearly demonstrates the value of Optichron's current DPD and CFR combination in enabling a cost-effective multi-carrier base station well ahead of the industry curve," said Perry Constantine, chief executive officer of Optichron. "With a single transmitter able to take the place of many, and greatly increased overall system efficiency, operators can benefit from reduced CAPEX and OPEX, whether in multiplying the capacity of existing infrastructure or building out greenfield opportunities at the lowest possible cost per carrier. Longer term CAPEX savings are also attractive, as migration to future standards such as LTE could be supported by the same wide-bandwidth, high-performance MC-GSM transmitter hardware."