Freescale makes strides in 3G LTE

BANGALORE: Freescale Semiconductors, which was a part of Motorola two years ago, is now stepping out of its parent’s shadow by increasing its customer footprint beyond Motorola.

Freescale provides the chipsets that power Motorola’s mid-range phones such as MotoRAZR and the Krzr. Also expected soon is the 3G lineup from Motorola. After the company’s take over by a consortium of private equity players for $17 billion (the largest tech buyout ever), Freescale is hoping to increase its share of non-Motorola business.

Sandeep Chennakeshu, senior vice president and general manager – wireless and mobility systems group, Freescale Semiconductor, said that in two years’ time the company intends to get into the larger merchant space. The wireless and mobility systems division is the second biggest revenue grosser for the company -around $1.6 billion of the $5.8 overall revenues- after the transportation and standard products business.

In February this year, Freescale along with Nokia, Elektrobit and Symbian announced its tie-up to create the first 3G mobile phone reference design using Freescale’s single core modem, targeted to run S60 software on Symbian OS. This reference design is expected to provide handset manufacturers and operators the first real solution to address the mid-tier 3G-market segment. This

At the recently held Freescale Technology Forum in Bangalore, Chennakeshu said that the company is doing innovation around the 3G Long Term Evolution (LTE) platform.

This platform would help in better delivery of services like mobile TV and Internet access. “Freescale is working on the architecture, power amplification, RF design and integration,” he said. He added that the team at Freescale is working to solve the challenges of size and power.

“The LTE would work as a modem and would be small enough to be slipped into a cell phone, PC, laptop or portable gaming device. One needs to think in terms of billion instructions per second and not million instructions per second,” he said.

He thinks that the next generation wireless broadband 3G LTE platforms would go commercial after 2009.

Freescale spends $1.2 billion on R&D efforts every year. The Austin, Texas-headquartered company has two development centers in India at Noida and Bangalore. “We recently announced a center of excellence for software in Bangalore and we plan to make this center the largest hub for software design for the company, ” said Chennakeshu.

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