Key to LTE winners is China Mobile
So far, only Texas Instruments among current smartphone chip suppliers has given up hope of surviving in the LTE market. TI recently announced a plan to cut about 1,700 jobs, and reiterated its intention to shift the focus of its OMAP product line away from smartphones.
Qualcomm continues to dominate the smartphone baseband market, and it’s dominance is not likely to change in the coming LTE world.
That hasn’t stopped companies such as MediaTek, Marvell, Spreadtrum, ST-Ericsson and Renesas Mobile from going after the LTE market as the “Qualcomm alternative.” Many have described big plans to launch multi-mode, multi-frequency chips that are backward-compatible with the legacy baseband systems.
Indeed, the list of chip companies gunning for the LTE baseband business appears to be increasing, not shrinking.
A Japanese mobile chip joint venture called Access Network Technology last week tipped plans for the company’s first LTE baseband chip, scheduled to be designed into Fujitsu’s smartphone handsets by the summer 2013.
The Japanese joint venture, founded in August, consists of Fujitsu (52.8 percent), NTT Docomo (19.9 percent), NEC (17.8 percent) and Fujitsu Semiconductor (9.5 percent). This is an offshoot of an off-again, on-again NTT Docomo-led mobile chip venture. Original members included Panasonic and Samsung, but the deal was cancelled last spring when stakeholders disagreed on the details of the joint venture.
According to a Fujitsu spokesman, the JV’s baseband chip is integrated with LTE, W-CDMA and China Mobile’s TD-LTE modems. The company claims power consumption in the new modem chip will be lower than competitors’ products by as much as 30 percent.
Of course, not every so-called “LTE solution” is the same.
Depending on the heritage of each competitor’s modem business, the degree of support for legacy modems differ. For example, Spreadtrum, a leading TD-SCDMA modem chip supplier, is still working on its own WCDMA solution.
I asked Fujitsu if the new chip from the mobile joint venture will support TD-SCDMA. She responded, “No, not in the current generation chip we’ve just finished.” She added, however: “being compatible with global standards is our goal.”
For any chip company looking for a TD-LTE design win with China Mobile, support for TD-SCDMA is a must. China Mobile demands that every TD-LTE solution must offer true multi-standard, multi-frequency capability.
Once again, that’s precisly how Qualcomm is going to win the battle since it is to offer a TD-SCDMA/TD-LTE reference design.
As Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, noted in his recent blog, “Qualcomm aims to be the first with a TD-SCDMA/TD-LTE solution which fits like a glove with China Mobile’s long-term plan. This will be the company’s third generation Qualcomm Reference Design (QRD).”
Strauss said Qualcomm’s QRD solution will be a Snapdragon S4 plus MSM8930 platform featuring a dual-core processor based on its Krait architecture. It will support UMTS, CDMA, TC-SCDMA, TD- and FDD-LTE, providing solutions that can help all operators in China.
Around the first quarter of 2013, we’ll see the LTE baseband race begin in earnest. It will be fought not with power point presentations, but in the commercial, volume market.
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