steve.
here's a nice succinct blurb on Datum and its niche. for the record, the press release stated that PMCS previously had an 8% stake (a la Toucan and Malleable DSP acquisitions).
-chris.
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PMC-Sierra's deal for Datum (Vancouver, B.C.) will garner a key technology that can dramatically cut the costs of installing cellular basestations. Glenn Bindley, vice president and general manager for PMC's access products division, said Datum has developed a technique that allows a DSP chip to distort a data signal before it is fed through the power amplifier and transmitted.
Current amplifiers distort these signals, which limits the effective frequency range they can utilize and thus limits bandwidth. The Datum technique carefully distorts the signal earlier in the process, so the amplifier-added distortion has the effect of cleaning up the signal and therefore increasing the usable frequency range.
While this will not increase the total bandwidth available from a basestation, it will require far fewer systems to support the total bandwidth.
"This is the power amplifier equivalent of using a pair of glasses, to distort the signal into something that is more usable," said Bindley.
Datum currently has this technology working in a lab setting, using FPGA chips. PMC-Sierra expects to turn it into a single-chip product that should sample later this year. Bindley stressed that Datum has several patents already for the concept, and that nobody else he knows of in the market is even attempting to pursue the idea.
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