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

Tensilica Claims #1 LTE IP spot

With the scramble to get chips into the LTE (a.k.a. 4G) market, most cellular baseband chip companies are licensing their DSP cores from one of two major suppliers: CEVA, Inc. and Tensilica, Inc. CEVA clearly has a significant IP market lead in 2G and 3G shipments, worldwide, claiming its IP in 36% of worldwide cellular baseband shipments in the third quarter of 2010.  However, both companies are fighting for LTE design-ins.  Tensilica claims to have the #1 position in LTE design-ins for cellular and lists the following companies as licensees for LTE (note, however, that CEVA has also licensed its DSP cores for LTE basebands at some of these same companies):

• Fujitsu
• Huawei
• Infineon (through Blue Wonder Communications)
• MediaTek (through DoCoMo)
• NEC
• Panasonic
• Renesas
• Wavesat

Tensilica promises to introduce new, more powerful cores for both terminals and infrastructure at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in another two weeks, and at least one of Tensilica’s LTE infrastructure baseband licensees (see below) will be announcing products there, too.   Since LTE baseband shipments are currently a miniscule segment of the cellphone market, there’s still room for competition.

Egypt-based SySDSoft Claims 3 of the Top 10 Chip Houses for its LTE Software Stack

Cairo-based SySDSoft, Inc. claims to have licensed its UE protocol stack for LTE to 7 wireless chip companies, including 3 of the top 10 houses.  SySDSoft will have a stand at MWC where they will demonstrate what they claim as “the world’s highest performance for the UE stack, achieving CAT5 even for the smallest packet sizes.”

Their principal LTE PHY stack competitor, mimoOn GmbH, and LTE layer 2&3 stack competitor, 4M Wireless, will also have stands at MWC. Note that all of these LTE protocol stack suppliers are prime candidates for acquisition in 2011.

DesignArt Networks Challenges Wireless Infrastructure Chip Houses

This month, Israel-based DesignArt Networks will be launching its DAN3800 SoC that is a complete multi-sector, multi-gigabit LTE Advanced Baseband chip. Based on multi-core Tensilica DSPs and multi-core ARM9s, the DAN3800 is claimed to have a fraction of the power consumption of competing chip solutions of similar throughputs.  According to the company’s CTO, “Consuming only 8 Watts, the DAN3800 delivers multiples in performance of currently available silicon solutions – powering an entire 4-sector LTE Advanced Macro BTS for the delivery of up to 1.2 Gbps of raw 4G data capacity – all with just one single DAN3800 Baseband SoC.”  This low power allows the company to address ambient-cooled pico basestation solutions on telephone poles as well as (through multiple chips) full macro base stations.  The company’s investors include Motorola Ventures, Carmel Ventures, and Magma Venture Partners.  So, DesignArt now joins the elite group of macro base station baseband chip suppliers, namely, Texas Instruments, Freescale, LSI, Mindspeed, and (soon) Intel.

Intel Mobile Communications Emerges

This week, Intel announced that it has completed its acquisition of Infineon Technologies‘ cellular chip business. At the upcoming MWC in Barcelona, Intel Mobile Communications will have a stand, presumably replacing the former Infineon Technologies stand.  It is presently unclear as to how independent the newly-acquired German operations will be.

Icera Offers its First HSPA+ Handset Chip

Last week, Icera announced its new Espresso®450 chip which comprises Icera’s latest baseband and RF technology and delivers quad-band HSPA+ up to 28Mbps together with full quad-band 2G/3G voice support functions.  The company claims that the two-chip set is in the industry’s smallest footprint, a tiny 700mm2. Icera has been shipping its chipsets in high volume to the data dongle market, but this is the company’s first offering aimed at smartphones, providing a complete radio interface layer for the Android operating system and full validated voice technology.  Clearly, they want to be an application processor’s best friend.  Samples of first phones using Espresso®450 will be showing at MWC and first products are expected to ship in late 2011.

Freescale Announces first Quad-Core Cortex-A9 Chip

In case you missed the early January announcement, Freescale Semiconductor became the first company to announce a quad-core Cortex-A9 chip.  The chip is the top-of-the line of the company’s new i.MX6 family of Cortex-A9 based chips, following Solo- and Dual-core members, all to be available with up to 1.2 GHz operation.  Neon DSP and 3D Graphics are part of all family members, along with L2 caches starting at 256kB up to 2MB at the high end. Freescale envisions applications like monochrome eBooks at the low end of the family (where the current i.MX products are the market leader), with color eBooks served by dual-core versions (along with basic business tablets and medical products) and the quad-cores serving media tablets, netbooks and luxury infotainment products.

Clearly, Freescale is investing heavily in its multimedia product line, which will provide balance to the company’s traditional automotive and communications infrastructure emphasis.

New Industry Alliance Kicks off at MWC

One of the problems of LTE is that products for LTE must also support 3G and 2G over several frequency bands.  The transmitter solution for efficient operation has been to install as many as 8 power amplifiers in a handset, each designed to be efficient for a given frequency band. A technique that is said to increase power efficiency (and thus lower power consumption) involves envelope tracking of the input power to the power amplifier, also resulting in fewer power amplifiers in a handset. The new OpenET Alliance (www.open-et.org) has the goal of standardizing envelope interface specifications both for handsets and infrastructure applications.  The OpenET Alliance is a non-profit organization, and it is being initially backed by Nujira Ltd., the primary supplier of envelope tracking solutions.  The kickoff begins at MWC as spelled out on the website.