In addition to chips and tools, PicoChip offers application software for 3G cellular and WiMax base stations. Some PicoChip customers use these reference designs as a black box; others customize them; still others write complete applications themselves.

A key factor characterizing PicoChip’s approach is homogeneity—a typical PicoChip-based cellular basestation or WiMAX PHY design employs one or a few PicoChip chips. In contrast, other processor companies offering solutions for wireless infrastructure applications (Texas Instruments and Freescale, for example) typically employ DSP+FPGA combinations. Developing and debugging applications on such heterogeneous architectures is likely to be complex, despite these companies’ well-understood architectures and strong tools support. Moving functions from the DSP to the FPGA or vice versa, for instance, can be rather cumbersome—doing so for the PicoChip processing elements is likely to be simpler. PicoChip’s software-based programming model is another factor that may contribute to its appeal, especially for engineers lacking the hardware design expertise that FPGA-based designs typically require.

There are similarities between the PicoChip architectural approach and that taken by some of the newer parallel-processor start-ups.  Fabless semiconductor startup Ambric, for instance, has a similar massively parallel architecture and programming model but is instead focused on multimedia. Will the current wave of parallel processor start-ups yield more survivors like PicoChip, or is PicoChip an anomaly? Tools and application software are likely to be two critical factors determining the answer to these questions.