About us
cellXica design and manufacture radio equipment.
Our core team of about twenty people, based just outside Cambridge UK, are focussed on design and implementation. We have a network of partners, both local and international, who help us develop our technologies and manufacture our products.
Much of this is based around our SC5 SDR platform. The first prototypes were built during 2011 using the latest FPGA and RFIC technology available at the time. The main objective was to support an LTE base station we were developing from the ground up, but it also needed to support pre-existing applications, such as a WCDMA base station, and other applications that had yet to be conceived.
Many of cellXica’s staff previously worked at Airvana, developing a UMTS femtocell. The femtocell hardware was based on Xilinx FPGA devices, such as the Spartan 3 and Spartan 6 for the physical layer, a standalone microcontroller for the protocol stacks and mixed signal and RF devices from Analog Devices. When Airvana decided to not pursue this market, they licenced the IP and development continued. After a year or so, and with the benefit of advances in devices from Xilinx and Analog Devices, cellXica’s first SDR platform, the SC5, was conceived and development started.
The basic SC5 architecture and infrastructure has also been extended to the SC6 platform, which employs an LTE SoC as a co-processor to allow support of significantly greater capacity than can be supported on an FPGA on its own, and the SC7 platform, a new SDR platform using the latest FPGA technology. The infrastructure has also been employed in other platforms, allowing more rapid development of novel equipment than would otherwise have been the case.