CTIA Observations
At the Cellular Telephone Industry Association (CTIA) convention in Las Vegas last week, we made a few top-level observations:
- Femtocells seemed to be everywhere. Major cellular operators, including Vodafone and U.S. operators AT&T and Sprint announced their endorsements and even some new femtocell products.
- Qualcomm, which seemed to be lukewarm to the idea last year, has jumped into the femtocell chip market with offerings for both UMTS and EV-DO.
- Of course, introductions of LTE-capable devices, infrastructure and operator services were legion at the show.
- Several China-based cellphone makers were displaying their wares, some for the first time. We met with Haier, Huawei, Konka, Longcheer, Ningbo Bird and ZTE.
- NTT DoCoMo was displaying its LTE USB dongles based on chips from Renesas. This reinforces rumors that Renesas is being considered by Nokia for LTE products.
Buy an iPhone; get a Femtocell
Not wanting subscriber complaints like those that AT&T and O2 had when they rolled out iPhones that overloaded their 3G networks, Vodafone U.K. has taken a different tact as they begin shipping iPhones. Sales clerks in Vodafone stores there are wearing badges that essentially say "Only Vodafone can guarantee home coverage. Ask me how." The answer is get a femtocell and you won't have the problem (and, of course, Vodafone eases the load on its 3G network). Brilliant plan!
Some say that AT&T should do the same. However, according to the latest PC World magazine, AT&T now has the fastest and most reliable 3G network in the U.S., indicating that those billions they have invested in improving the network are now paying off.
Finally, a CDMA iPhone?
The trade press is all abuzz about a rumored new version of the iPhone for Verizon, which employs CDMA technology rather than GSM/UMTS employed in current iPhones. The Taiwan trade magazine Digitimes reports that Pegatron Technology (a subsidiary of ASUSTeK) will be making the new Apple phone in the second half of 2010. If true, Qualcomm will be the chipset winner, since they are the only source of advanced CDMA-1xEV-DO modem chips.
Perhaps Verizon will soon experience the network overloads and subscriber complaints that other carriers experienced when they first introduced iPhones.
Another Atom-based Cellphone Spotted at CTIA
Intel's first cellphone "socket" for the new Moorestown version of its Atom processor family was announced a few months ago in the forthcoming LG GW990. At CES in January, Intel's CEO demo'ed another Smartphone based of the Intel chip from a Finish company, Aava Mobile Oy, born of Nokia and Flextronics veterans and backed by Intel. At CTIA, Aava was demonstrating (in a suite) their reference handset design based on Intel's Moorestown and ST-Ericsson's HSDPA modem that employs MeeGo and Android software. Since the application processor is based on X86 architecture, Aava claims that "it's the smallest personal computer in the world." That may be a stretch, but Aava is seeking to license its complete design to OEMs/ODMs in Taiwan and China. When the company's spokesman was pressed on power consumption metrics, the vague answer was "better than we expected." He wouldn't say what he expected.
WiMAX Gets a Boost
Last week's introduction of the new HTC EVO EV-DO/WiMAX handset continued Qualcomm's Snapdragon winning streak in cellphone modems while the handset's Sequans' WiMAX solution will likely boost the worldwide market for WiMAX chips from the hundreds of thousands per month to the millions per month this year. Whenever a product migrates from other venues to the cellphone, that product's market explodes. This happened earlier for Wi-Fi, digital camera sensors, GPS and more. Now it's time for WiMAX.
This is on the heels of Sequans' mid-March announcement of sampling its first TD-LTE baseband SoC for USB dongles that will be deployed by China Mobile at World Expo 2010 in Shanghai beginning in May. Three years ago at 3GSM (predecessor to Mobile World Congress), Georges Karam, CEO of Sequans, told me, "We view WiMAX as 'training wheels' for LTE." With both WiMAX and LTE now Sequans products, it looks like Karam's view has been vindicated.
Wavesat also Transitions from WiMAX to LTE
Wavesat, another WiMAX chip vendor transitioning to LTE, has announced that it is sampling its Odyssey 9010 SoC for either WiMAX or LTE CAT-3 baseband performance (TDD or FDD). A complete LTE protocol stack and reference design kits are available. Taiwan-based ODM Alpha Networks has selected the chip for its forthcoming line of USB dongles and other consumer devices. Needless to say, other WiMAX chip suppliers will soon announce LTE SoC products, too.
The "Land Rush" for LTE-based USB dongles is clearly evident, but the strong will emerge from the weak in a couple of years when multimode (4G+3G+2.5G+2G) operation will become necessary.
ST-Ericsson's LTE Modem Comes into Focus
Although it was announced at the recent Mobile World Congress that STE would be employing the NXP-heritage Embedded Vector Processor (EVP) in their new LTE handset modem, that was not the whole story. STE's T3G China subsidiary has been shipping TD-SCDMA modem chips based on the EVP; however, that's not the same EVP that is in STE's LTE modem. The TD-SCDMA solution is based on a fixed-point DSP capability, while the new HSPA+/LTE modem is based on a floating-point DSP architecture, which makes programming easier for a software-defined modem that will be necessary as LTE standards evolve over time. It's a single-processor baseband which STE feels is more than adequate through LTE Release 10.
Tabula's Novel 3D PLD Architecture Targets Wireless Infrastructure
Not 3D in the movie sense, but as 2D (X-Y placement and routing) plus time as the third dimension. Tabula, Inc. has announced the ABAX family of 3-D Programmable Logic Devices (3PLD) based on the company's Spacetime™ 3-D architecture developed by seasoned Silicon Valley FPGA veterans. Providing programmability in applications historically served only by ASICs or ASSPs, ABAX represents a new category of programmable logic device. Based on TSMC's 40 nm process, the design flow is said to be similar to FPGA and ASIC flows; using synthesis, placement, and routing to compile designs from RTL into silicon automatically.
With up to 1,280 multiplier/accumulator blocks and a variety of soft cores available, including sRIO, CPRI and OBSAI, as well as DDR2, DDR3, 10 Gb Ethernet and PCIexpress, it's clear that wireless infrastructure is a target market. Sampling is slated for Q3/2010, with volume production in Q4.
LSI's Infrastructure Business Re-invigorated
After 9 acquisitions and 2 divestitures since 2006, LSI Corporation has morphed into a major force in hard disk drive and networking chips along with its system-level markets in storage systems, NAS, SAS and SAN. They had a good year in 2009 and expect a strong 2010 and have announced a $250m share buyback program. Long the No. 1 supplier of DSP chips to the 2G/2.5G base station market, LSI Corp. has aggressively branched into media and wireless gateways with advanced echo cancelling technology built on its Bell Labs IP heritage and we noted a significant design win at Cisco. The company's new flagship Axxia™ communication processor family, which consists of multiple PowerPCs and multiple StarCore™ DSP cores, is said to handle as many as 3,000 gateway channels per chip with what the company claims "the market's lowest power per channel". LSI is actively working with one of the two tier-one base station suppliers on LTE solutions (they won't say which), and investing heavily in that activity.
Cognovo's Unique Background
Briefly mentioned in my last newsletter as one of the companies introducing an LTE baseband at MWC'10, Cognovo is a spinoff of ARM Ltd. The vector processor architecture is termed "Ardbeg" and derived from ARM's Optimo™ vector processor family earlier acquired from Frontier Silicon and paired with the SODA wireless instruction set developed with the University of Michigan.
The key people at Cognovo came from TTPCom, the 3G stack provider that was purchased by Motorola, so they are seasoned in cellular technology. Cognovo has no intention of offering silicon, rather they are licensing their software-defined baseband IP to companies with their own chip design capabilities.
Shameless Plug:
Our newest market study, "Smartphone Device & Chip Market Opportunities '10" covers all Smartphone vendors (not just the top 5) and their 2009 market shares and changes from 2008. It also provides dozens of detailed forecasts by global region by air interface technology and operating systems through 2014. All major cellular and peripheral ICs are also individually covered. Details are at www.fwdconcepts.com/smartphone10
As always, I invite your comments.
Will
President & Principal Analyst
wis@fwdconcepts.com
Forward Concepts
1575 W. University Dr. #111, Tempe AZ 85281, U.S.A.
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