Guest Blog by Will Strauss, President & Principal Analyst, Forward Concepts

Intel Bulks up Again in LTE

In early March, Intel purchased most of the assets of Cairo-based SysDSoft, one of only two licensors of LTE level-2-and-above software stacks. It is unlikely that Intel will allow the entity to continue the licensing business, so that leaves U.K.-based 4M Wireless as the last man standing in the merchant LTE level-2+ stack business. At MWC, we met with SysDSoft and learned that the 120-man Cairo operations were originally a branch of an American company, Ellipsis Digital Systems. The Cairo operation, headed by Dr. Khaled Ismail (a graduate of MIT and veteran of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center), split from Ellipsis in 2002 with two people to provide MAC-layer software for Wi-Fi and design services.  The new company then expanded into Bluetooth, WiMAX and RF Design services.  SysDSoft claims to have been profitable since 2005. 

Until the Intel acquisition, the company offered both LTE UE (terminal) and LTE eNodeB (base station) support for both ARM9 and MIPS24KF platforms.  They had earlier licensed their LTE UE stack to Infineon and Beceem (recently acquired by Broadcom), among several others.  Rumor has it that the deal went down for about $50 million, much of that based on the value of the patents and IP.  Intel hired about 100 of SysDSoft’s engineers and it will be interesting to see how Intel’s new Cairo operations interact with their extensive wireless development center in Haifa.  However, it appears that Intel Mobile Communications in Germany (formerly Infineon Technologies) will be the primary interface with the newly acquired Egypt operation.

Intel also Gobbles up Silicon Hive

Netherlands-based Silicon Hive is a Philips Semiconductor spin-out that offers a licensable C-programmable massively parallel architecture for low-power DSP and video processing.  At MWC, Intel announced that they were acquiring the company…one that Intel Capital had earlier invested in.  Although Silicon Hive has offered a family of communication signal processors based on the architecture, my perception is that the company has been more successful with its image processing and video processing product families. I believe that it is the latter two applications that Intel wants to exploit for use with their new 32nm Medfield implementation of its Atom™ processor family.  Medfield is Intel’s hope for finally getting Atom into a real smartphone.

CSR & Zoran Merge

Soon after Mobile World Congress, CSR and Zoran announced that they were merging.  The synergies of CSR’s Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and audio with Zoran’s imaging and video processing could be compelling, but as my colleague David Manners of Electronics Weekly pointed out, the synergies expected by the proponents of M&A are rarely as productive as expected.

MediaTek Licenses LTE Baseband DSP from Coresonic

Sweden-based Coresonic AB offers a baseband-specific DSP based on its unique SIMT™ (Single Instruction-flow Multiple Tasks) architecture that uses a task-level pipeline for parallelization. The company provides its technology as an architecture license or as silicon IP cores, and claims smaller size, lower-power consumption and fewer lines of code compared with traditional DSP designs.  Just prior to MWC, the company announced that MediaTek had earlier licensed the architecture for a future LTE baseband.  The company’s CEO, Johan Lodenius, was formerly a Qualcomm VP of Product Management.

Genasic: New LTE RF Transceiver Coming

U.K.-based Genasic Design Systems Ltd. is an independent RF transceiver supplier that expects to begin sampling its first low-power LTE-capable RF transceiver chip by mid-year.  The company’s CEO, Ashok Dhuna, was earlier involved with RF design at Sequans and has built on that experience with his new company.  Genasic’s claim to fame is a low-power CMOS approach (in 65nm) with multi-band capability from 698MHz to 2.7GHz.  They expect that their 2RX/1TX chip will draw <300 mW, enabling dongles that operate under the 2.5-W limit.  But, femtocells and handsets are also in their future planning.

Cloud Radio Picks up a Crowd

In my last newsletter, I mentioned Intel’s approach to cloud computing for aggregating basebands for hundreds of base stations at a central location.  Also at MWC, others were touting their approach to centralized baseband operation: Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio active antenna processing drew considerable interest at the Congress, but that is simply one element of the centralized baseband approach they are exploring.  Like Intel, IBM Corporation is also researching the cloud baseband approach in China based on its own SDR approach. At CTIA in Orlando last week, Nokia-Siemens Networks unveiled its Liquid Radio approach that allows baseband pools of more than 10Gbps to be shared across 100 cells.

As we mentioned in our last newsletter, the concept of remote radio heads on cellular towers favors the active antenna products by Ubidyne (now competing with Powerwave Technologies and Alca-Lu’s lightRadio) but the need to cram more digital data from the remote radio head on the antenna to a central “cloud” baseband location favors compression algorithm company Samplify Systems.  But, another concept involves carrying the RF signals from the remote radio heads over dark fiber to the central location, reducing latency problems inherent in digital processing of the signal.  But, since dark fiber is not widely available, it makes sense only in select locations.

From a DSP chip (or DSP-centric SoC) standpoint, Texas Instruments (who is working with NSN on Liquid Radio) assures us that the future centralized baseband approach will not materially affect the market size for such silicon, just where it is installed.

Qualcomm Provides Access to its DSPs

Late last month, Qualcomm announced its OEMs and ISVs will now be able to program their own audio and video codecs using optimized processors and hardware on select versions of Qualcomm’s Mobile Station Modem™ (MSM) chipsets through the new Qualcomm Developer Network DSP Access Program. This allows OEMs to better differentiate their smartphone and tablet devices by augmenting or modifying the Snapdragon™ platform’s multimedia suite with their own features or procure differentiated features directly from ISVs.

A bit of background is helpful.  Qualcomm has long employed two of its own DSP cores in its modem chipsets: one as a pure cellular datapump modem (mDSP) and the other optimized as a speech and audio engine (aDSP). Qualcomm is enabling access only to aDSP, since disturbing the modem functionality would negate the cellphone type approvals required in several parts of the globe. In the case of Snapdragon, where the MSM is joined by the multimedia-centric ARM v.7 circuitry, much of the audio/video capability on the MSM becomes redundant and free for other uses, so Qualcomm reserves MIPS and memory for users.  It‘s actually a novel way to provide additional or enhanced multimedia functionality without adding more chips to the BOM.

AT&T’s Planned Purchase of T-Mobile: There Will be Blood

AT&T’s parent is the largest private “union shop” in the United States, with some 400,000 of its employees as members of unions.  The AT&T Mobility acquisition of T-Mobile will certainly lead to many redundancies (read: layoffs). One might think that the unions would be upset at the prospect of losing some of their members, but the Communications Workers of America, which represents 42,000 AT&T Mobility workers, is salivating at the idea of unionizing T-Mobile’s workforce. One wonders if lack of union representation of its employees enabled T-Mobile to offer cheaper rates than those of AT&T. There may be great operational advantages for AT&T from the accrued cost savings and reduced competition (even largely-non-union Verizon Wireless applauds the reduced competition), but lower cellular subscription prices are not a likely result.  There will be blood.

Open Kernel Labs Brags of OKL4 Deployment

OK-Labs has been a pioneer in introducing hypervisors in cellphones, with Qualcomm as its biggest customer.  Hypervisors provide Virtual Machines that can enable multiple simultaneous operating systems on a single processor and/or segregate functions and applications.  The OK-Labs approach can also provide secure communications for otherwise off-the-shelf cellphones.  The company has just announced that its OKL4 Microvisor has been deployed in 1.2 billion mobile devices, primarily attributable to Qualcomm, but ST-Ericsson is also a customer.

Sandbridge: A Tale of Two Acquisitions

In my two previous newsletters, I reported that Sandbridge Technologies Inc., a designer of cellular baseband chip, had been acquired 1) by Qualcomm and 2) by Wuxi DSP Technologies.  I obtained information for both stories from sources that I deem reliable.  However, in checking with Sandbridge executives, they could not shed any light on the situation, since they are under NDA with both parties.  My speculation is that Qualcomm acquired all of the patents and IPR while Wuxi DSP Technologies acquired the people.  Wuxi DSP Technologies, in turn, licensed the IPR back from Qualcomm.  When the NDAs expire in two years, we’ll know the whole story.

As always, I invite your comments.