These are fighting words from LSI, an acknowledged pioneer in chip integration, which continues to have a fiercely proud engineering culture.
'Qualcomm is a bit arrogant and their product isn't completely integrated,' Daane said. 'We're finding that customers want competition and that is helping us get design wins.'
As I recall the story, the founders of LSI were part of the Magnificent 7, the fabled group of engineers who resigned from Motorola on the same day in the 70s to seek their own startup fortunes in various bleeding-edge VLSI-related chip businesses including what would later become VLSI (now part of Philips), LSI, etc.
LSI and IDC collaborated on the 1st generation WLL Ultraphone (fixed TDMA) SoC in the 80s. Speculation is that
LSI is one of the potential partners on IDC's short list.
Given its deep heritage in SoC and its formidable though still somewhat underappreciated time-to-market skills, LSI would be a formidable competitor to QCOM once it has access to TDMA/CDMA IPRs embedded in the five standards of IMT2000 -- 2 TDMA and 3 CDMA.
As stated many times, QCOM does not have TDMA patents AND the WCDMA-only and GSM/WCDMA chips are expected to be the early 3G volume shipments while TDMA/GSM/GPRS/EDGE chips are expected to be the volume leaders in 2G in the next few years.
I think one thing that will also appeal to LSI is the natural way that GBT's groundbreaking 3G/4G work on matched filters builds on IDC's work because of the Schilling connection.
LSI to fight Qualcomm in CDMA arena
By Michael Baron, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 3:30 PM ET Jun 15, 2000 NewsWatch
Latest headlines
NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Challenging Qualcomm on its own turf, LSI Logic expects to introduce handsets based on its own code multiple division access (CDMA) technology in the fourth quarter, according to John Daane, an executive vice president at the semiconductor manufacturer.
Daane said LSI sees CDMA, where it will be Qualcomm's lone competitor, as a high growth area. He estimated the company's CDMA sales could total several hundred million dollars annually in a year or two.
Daane was speaking at a Bear Stearns Technology Conference here.
'Qualcomm is a bit arrogant and their product isn't completely integrated,' Daane said. "We're finding that customers want competition and that is helping us get design wins."
Daane added that second quarter bookings have been tremendous due to booming demand for communications equipment, especially from broadband and optical networking firms.
LSI now expects communications chips to account for 50 percent of its revenue in the third quarter, ahead of its previous expectation that this would occur by year-end.
Daane also said communications chip revenue is expected to grow 70 percent this year, up from the company's previous guidance of 60 percent.
LSI reported revenues of $615 million in the first quarter. The communications business accounted for about 40 percent of that business.
To accommodate the rising demand Daane said LSI plans to increase production at its Gresham, Oregon fabrication plant to 3,000 wafers per week, up from 2,500.
Gross margins are also expanding. Daane said LSI expects margins to be in the low to mid 40 s for the rest of this year and the low 50's next year.
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