Picochip was one of the first companies to start developing solutions for small cell basestation (femtocells), for homes and offices.
These help combat reception issues such as: dropped calls, poor sound quality, delays, and slow downloads.
This integrates 250–300 individual DSP cores onto a single die (depending on the specific product) and as such it can be described as a massively parallel processor array.
The programming model allows each processor to be coded independently (in ANSI C or assembler) and then to communicate over an any:any interconnect mesh.
Although the picoArray architecture is generic and could in principle be used for any DSP application, the company has stated its strategy is to focus on wireless infrastructure.
Independent benchmarks of representative communications systems by Berkeley Design (BDTI) indicate that the picoArray delivers significantly better performance-per-dollar than traditional single-core DSP devices.