ARM Community: ARM and Partners at CES - Femtocell, TrustZone and Networking - ARM Community

ARM is often talked about in mobile phone circles, but today I got to see another emerging area that ARM is turning out to be the solution of choice, Femto cells.
Here at CES, I spent some time at the Femtozone, the Femto forum’s booth. Femto cells are an exciting new emerging area where service providers are deploying a box that creates your very own cellular network in your home that gets connected to the rest of the cell network using existing broadband services in the home.
One could ask why would I want to do that? Well the answer is that, sometimes in suburban areas there is spotty coverage, so if you have a femtocell in your home, you and your family, could use your cell phone services more effectively and have a seamless user experience as you walk into your home.
There are some companies such as Alcatel-Lucent in collaboration with Sagem, who have deployed these boxes. One of ARM’s partners picoChip is helping these customers with their ARM based base station in a box solution.
As I talked to Rupert Baines, their VP of marketing, it was quite exciting to hear how the ARM processor is used to run complex mobile infrastructure stacks to support up to 8 users. Take a look at Charbax’s video interview with Rupert on his site, armdevices.net or below.
It's exciting to think that functionality that previously needed a big iron, air-cooled chassis, can now run on a card!



The other techie aspect that was cool was the TrustZone technology that picoChip is using in this application. ARM often talks about being the architecture for a digital world, well in this case, we are the architecture for your digital identity.
What do I mean by digital identity? If I think of my own case with all the online transactions that I do from my home and now, how I am starting to do mobile online transactions, my digital identity is wrapped up in these transactions. And as I travel so much, I have to make sure that my digital identity is not compromised. Otherwise I could find myself in Taiwan with my credit card not working. But I digress.
In the case of the Femto cell, if the security isn’t air-tight, someone could hack in to the entire cellular network from a femtocell and bring it down with malware, Denial of Service attacks etc. Having security that is “purer than pure” is critical to the success of Femto cell deployments. It's exciting to be the underlying technology that is bringing a better, safer user experience to the market.

As I wandered around the show, I walked past a SOHO networking company called TP-Link based out of China. I asked them if they used ARM user and, to my delight, they said yes. They have a wide array of products including wireless DSL routers etc. I also talked to a company called TeamF1 that provides Unified Threat management services for home networking platforms, one of their publically announced ARM based partners is Netgear. I asked Deepak Kulkarni, their VP of sales, why they had chosen to provide an ARM based solution, his answer was succinct “our customers are asking us for it and your eco-system for software development makes it easy.”
Multicore is the other reason that ARM is successful in this space. Providers, even for home networking, want headroom to rapidly add more services like Unified Threat Management, ARM11MP today and Cortex-A9 in the future seems to be the processors of choice.

Well I have more nerdy stuff to do, after all I am at Nerd central... so I will catch you later...

Lakshmi

Lakshmi Mandyam, Enterprise Segment Marketing Manager, ARM, is thrilled to be working on products and technologies that she can excitedly point to when she is out and about with her family. At ARM she is delighted to be able to change people’s perceptions about being able to deliver high performance enterprise solutions in a energy efficient mobile power profile.


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