June 22, 2020
The DPH153-AT Femtocell - The PicoChip
This sits on the board alongside the power supply.
It is a PicoChip PC312-hsc "picoXcell" with an ARM logo.
Next to it are:
- two Samsung K4T1G164QF chips (1Gbit 64M by 16) 256M of ram
- Spansion GL512P10FFCR2 chip. NOR flash 64M by 32M (256M of flash)
- SMSC 8700C - a 10/100 ethernet transciever (PHY)
Compare this to the Ralink chip with 16M of RAM and 4M of flash.
The Picochip combines an ARM11 with a DSP to handle the cellular.
It is a 2G/3G Femtocell specific SoC.
ARM11 is an older 32 bit ARM core. These days people would choose a Cortex-A.
Older Femtocell units used the earlier PicoChip PC202 along with a Xilinx SC3S400A FPGA.
Console
There are two 4 pin headers near the Picochip. We may as well solder two pins on
the center (the sides are power and ground) and see if we pick up serial traffic.
I try J3 at various baud rates, but see nothing at all on either pin.
J4 has pins closer than 0.1 inch spacing.
A scope on pin 3 sees a nice 10 Mhz clock.
pin 2 simply stays high.
This is not what I am looking for.
Have any comments? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Tom's electronics pages / [email protected]