LTE chipsets face lackluster market

Posted by Nick Jotischky Friday, February 20th, 2009

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Semiconductor companies have made backward-compatibility a selling point for 4G chipsets as the recession stalls the rollout of Long Term Evolution networks.

At last week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) trade show in Barcelona, Spain, only US-based operator Verizon Wireless committed to the commercial launch of a Long Term Evolution network in 2010. Verizon CTO Dick Lynch made the announcement when the company awarded Ericsson a contract to supply it with LTE RAN and packet-core equipment. Current Verizon vendors Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks will supply Verizon with the IMS layer, and Starent Networks will supply the packet-core gear. Although Lynch did not disclose the financial details of the contracts, analysts agree that they are worth billions.

This is capital spending on a scale that Vodafone, Verizon’s major shareholder, cannot afford for its European operations in the current economic climate. Nor can France Telecom or Deutsche Telekom. All three European operators will limit capital investments in LTE networks to placate nervous shareholders, thus delaying the commercial rollout of this 4G service by two or three years.

“The major equipment vendors are understandably keen to encourage all operators to invest early in 4G,” Didier Lombard, CEO of France Telecom, which owns wireless operator Orange, told the Financial Times. “However, the reality on the ground is that a large-scale rollout of LTE across all our geographies is unnecessary for at least a couple of years, given the headroom that still exists with 3G and 3G+.”

Hamid Akhavan, head of Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile division, predicted that large-scale commercial LTE services “probably won’t be deployed in Europe before 2011.”

Hopes weren’t dashed

The public statements by the European operators only confirm what the handset manufacturers and their suppliers have long prepared for. Contrary to comments that the handset industry’s “hopes were dashed” by the European operators’ MWC announcements, the actions of the mobile chipset suppliers, in particular, show that they were not expecting the imminent availability of LTE services to lift sagging handset sales brought on by the widespread lack of consumer confidence.

In December, Enrico Salvatori, executive vice president of Qualcomm Europe, said that although the US mobile-chipset supplier would have engineering samples of its LTE chipsets available in 2Q09, the availability of LTE-compatible handsets would depend on when operators could actually afford to deploy LTE networks. “We see a lot of testing in late 2009 and early 2010,” he said of LTE handsets. “We think commercial devices will be available in late 2010 or early 2011, but we are assuming a lot of pieces that are completely out of our control.”

At a pre-MWC briefing given to Informa Telecoms & Media, Qualcomm said that it has based its LTE-chipset road map on two key observations: First, even without an economic downturn, it typically takes six or seven years from its publication for a successful wireless standard to garner 50 million subscriptions (see fig. 1). Second, LTE and HSPA+ are on “parallel evolution paths” (see fig. 2). Qualcomm therefore designs its LTE chipsets to be multimode, or backward compatible.

At MWC 2008, Qualcomm unveiled the Mobile Data Modem (MDM) 9xxx series of chipsets that would support the LTE standard while being backward compatible with UMTS and CDMA2000 networks. At this year’s MWC, the company’s big LTE announcement was that its new Mobile Station Modem (MSM) 8960 chipset would support a number of standards apart from LTE, including 1xEV-DO Rev. B and Simultaneous Voice-Data Operation (SV-DO), as well as multicarrier HSPA+.

A company press release said that because the MSM8960 features radio frequency, software and pin-compatibility with the MSM8260 and MSM8660 chipsets for HSPA+ and HSPA+/EV-DO Rev. B, device manufacturers will “benefit from the economies of scale and existing investments into designs based on those two solutions,” and it said that “the MSM8960 chipset also supports LTE-TDD.”

RF Micro Devices has taken the same approach with the unveiling of the RF6460, a chipset architecture that the company says can be compatible with up to nine cellular bands. “It simultaneously supports the implementation of up to five WCDMA/HSPA+/LTE bands – three high bands and two low bands – and all four bands of GSM/GPRS/EDGE in 3G/4G multimode mobile devices,” a company press release stated.

“RFMD’s RF6460 converged front-end platform streamlines the design of 3G/4G multimode handset platforms by shrinking the solution size, reducing overall component count and optimizing efficiency for all modes and power levels,” said Eric Creviston, president of RFMD’s Cellular Products Group. “This enables platform providers and phone manufacturers to accelerate time-to-market of next-generation 3G and 4G multimode devices that can deliver greater talk times at lower costs and in smaller form factors.”

At MWC, Germany-based semiconductor company Infineon said it was already sampling its second-generation LTE-radio-frequency transceiver, called the SMARTi LU. Although Infineon boasted that the SMARTi LU is “a single-chip 65nm CMOS RF transceiver tailored for the highest LTE data rates of up to 150Mbps,” it also said that the chip supports “the global spread of the HSPA/LTE spectrum throughout a wide variety of bands,” such as HSPA+, HSPA, WCDMA and GSM/GPRS/EDGE.

Lone ranger

The one semiconductor company that chose not to emphasize the backward compatibility of its LTE technology with 3G networks was Texas-based Freescale. At MWC, it demonstrated a new device architecture “created specifically to capitalize on LTE” by streaming a high-definition video on a prototype device. The company wanted to show that its LTE chipset architecture was already capable of achieving peak data rates of 96Mbps downlink and 86Mbps uplink by delivering closely coupled Layer 1 and Layer 2 LTE radio processing.

The solution on display at MWC, Freescale stated, combined “programmable data plane software with Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AdvancedMC) featuring the MPC8548 PowerQUICC III processor and the quad-core MSC8144 StarCore DSP.”

“Our ability to demonstrate streaming HD video at such high data rates illustrates both the growing maturity of the LTE specification and our unique implementation,” said Tom Deitrich, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale’s Cellular Products Group. “We are committed to working with and supporting key partners to rapidly commercialize LTE for operators.”