China puts 3G spec on speed dial
By Mike Clendenin and Patrick Mannion
EE Times, November 8, 2002 (3:36 p.m. EST)
commsdesign.com
HONG KONG — For all those listening, China is calling. The message: Its 3G standard will be a reality, and its companies will have a seat at the bargaining table when the haggling begins over intellectual property (IP).
China's government erased nagging doubts about its support for the regional 3G spec, TD-SCDMA, when it assigned the technology 55 MHz of core spectrum, plus 100 MHz for future use. The two dominant global standards — wideband CDMA and cdma2000 1x — were each granted a 60-MHz block, plus 30 MHz each for the future.
The spectrum decision, made late last month, is another milestone in the development of TD-SCDMA (time-division synchronous code-division multiple-access) technology. While 3G deployment is just getting off the ground in China — licenses probably will not be issued for another year — chip manufacturers should already be thinking about whether they should allocate development resources for TD-SCDMA.
And while the technology's success is still far from certain, China's status as the world's largest cell phone market — at about 180 million subscribers, and growing fast — should be enough to convince some chip vendors to gamble on the country's third-generation spec.
Several years in the making, TD-SCDMA now is one of three 3G standards approved by the International Telecommunication Union. Its backers say that it is more bandwidth-efficient than competing technologies and is thus highly suited for deployment in densely populated Chinese cities.
They also say it is at least 20 percent cheaper to implement and that it has higher data transfer rates for Internet access. The latter is due to the technology's ability to use time slots to adjust dynamically to constantly changing asymmetric upstream and downstream data flows between a handset and Web server.
TD-SCDMA can also leverage "smart" antenna technology, which typically blankets a larger area with less power, meaning lower basestation deployment costs.
The allocation was a welcome bit of reality for a standard still cooped up in the lab. Recent months have been hard going for its main backers — China's Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Group and Germany's Siemens AG — as rumors and media reports within China speculated that the government was divided about the wisdom of pursuing a third global standard.
3G or bust
Shortly after the allocation, those working most closely to shepherd the standard to reality interpreted the decision as a signal that China would not lose out on intellectual-property development for 3G, as it did for the two previous generations.
"If they miss 3G, they will have to wait 15 more years to get 4G," said Philippe Gaglione, chief technology officer of Commit, a multicompany Sino-foreign joint venture in Shanghai that is developing TD-SCDMA chip sets and handset reference designs. "So they have to be there, and this is why they have invested in TD-SCDMA. I am completely convinced that they want to give it a go."
Several companies have already moved to back the standard, although a few appear to be hedging their bets on the competing specs. Commit, for instance, comprises more than a dozen companies, including Texas Instruments Inc., Nokia (a huge backer of W-CDMA), LG Telecom and Taiwanese mobile-phone maker DBTel — one of only a few foreign companies, and the only one from Taiwan, licensed to manufacture and sell phones in China. Formed early this year, Commit expects to have first silicon in early 2004.
Siemens and Datang have been the driving forces behind network equipment development, such as basestations and switches. Dutch concern RTX Telecom is working with Siemens to develop silicon solutions. And, more recently, telco equipment provider UT Starcom, which has strong Chinese ties, said it too will develop TD-SCDMA network gear, according to sources in China.
In the United States, chip makers' views vary on how much their development work will be affected by China's TD-SCDMA push, with assessments of the impact ranging from slim to severe.
TI said the move validates its DSP-based approach to radio baseband design. "There are many standards, and with a DSP-based SDR [software-defined radio] approach, system vendors can accommodate most if not all of those in a single system," said Sandeep Kumar, strategic marketing manager for wireless infrastructure at TI. The only customers that stand to suffer are those that have committed to an ASIC design, he said.
Donald Chu, business development manager of the wireless infrastructure division of Analog Devices Inc., also predicted his company will see minimal impact. "We already have suitable down- and upconverters," he said. "The specs for TD-SCDMA are similar to — if not more relaxed [than] — cdma2000 with respect to chip rate, filtering and noise requirements."
A greater issue will be handset availability, Chu said, but adjacent-channel interference and blocking requirements won't be known until China finalizes its 3G specification.
Motorola Inc.'s Semiconductor Products Sector is already pursuing a chip set that will support the TD-SCDMA protocol, said Jim Mielke, director of radio products architecture and applications. The Motorola chip set will be part of the i.300 Innovative Convergence platform, which is scheduled for delivery in 2004, he said.
"It's not a big shift to include TD-SCDMA within semiconductors, especially with advances in software-defined radios," said Jim Gunn, an associate with Forward Concepts Co.
But Lou Lupin, senior vice president and general counsel for Qualcomm Inc., said many chip makers may be taking an overly simplistic view. Qualcomm owns intellectual-property (IP) rights for any CDMA-based technology, he said, and has to date licensed TD-SCDMA-based technology to more than 40 companies. "Each implementation of CDMA — whether it's W-CDMA, cdma2000 or TD-SCDMA — has shown itself difficult to implement," he said. "It's definitely not a minor modification or tweak to go from one to the other and will require a lot of redesign work."
Lingering IP issues
No Chinese manufacturers have yet licensed Qualcomm's IP, but Lupin said they will have to do so if they want to move forward with the TD-SCDMA standard. "It's very early yet; setting aside the spectrum is only a very preliminary step," he said. "But if they do push forward, we're very willing to license our IP fairly."
There has been little public discussion thus far over Qualcomm's IP rights in TD-SCDMA. But the issue is sure to rear its head as networks and handsets for TD-SCDMA come closer to reality. Some think that Qualcomm, if it does not acquiesce to doing so on its own, may be forced to set licensing fees for Chinese companies at levels that are reasonable by Chinese standards.
"The road to TD-SCDMA does go through Qualcomm. It would be very hard to develop products without using some of their IP," said Terry Cheng, TI's regional president in Asia and a key architect of the Commit venture. "But when TD-SCDMA catches on, if [Qualcomm] wants to remain a dominant player in the market, they will eventually want to make TD-SCDMA chip sets — and that means they will have to license IP from Chinese companies."
Such a scenario mirrors past and current strategies in China. For instance, the country's government-supported researchers helped develop an alternative standard to video disks — called Super VCD — that China leveraged against foreign companies seeking access to the Chinese market as a bargaining chip to bring down the licensing fees levied on its domestic manufacturers. Arguably, a similar scenario is playing out for next-generation DVDs as local manufacturers of DVD players look to amass some IP bartering power against the DVD Forum.
The question for TD-SCDMA is whether local mobile operators will sign on to using the standard. So far, the country's major mobile carriers, China Mobile and China Unicom, have not committed to using TD-SCDMA technology for data delivery.
Indeed, China Mobile, the No. 1 carrier, is already rolling out a General Packet Radio Services network and looks likely to go with W-CDMA in the future. Second-ranked Unicom has invested in a cdma2000 network that it will likely upgrade to cdma2000 1x to handle data.
"For China Mobile and China Unicom, their future choice is very clear," said Gary Cai, a Beijing-based telecom consultant at BDA China Ltd. "I don't think backers of the other two standards will be worried about this [allocation]."
That leaves a handful of others, such as fixed-line carriers China Telecommunications Group Corp. (which already has a Personal Handy Phone System network) and China Netcom Corp., as potential test beds for the technology's commercialization.
Another uncertainty is the commitment of China's emerging network gear makers. A few weeks ago, at a government-arranged ceremony, Datang formed an industry alliance with seven Chinese companies, including Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp., to prove that there is wide support for implementing the standard. But no firm commitments were required by the companies.
Back-room concerns
Commit's Gaglione noted that one concern will be getting enough manufacturing commitments to make sure the network gear and handsets are commercially competitive with W-CDMA and cdma2000. That is also a worry privately discussed among Chinese officials, who remember that not long ago, a shortage of handsets, plus higher prices, hobbled the initial rollout of China Unicom's CDMA network. To spur R&D and achieve critical mass, Datang said it will share IP within the alliance formed recently.
In a recent interview with EE Times, a senior executive of Siemens said that China's 3G standard won't go beyond trials this year but contradicted recent reports out of China that the government's support is waning for the technology.
"I know the Chinese government is offering even stronger support toward TD-SCDMA than two years ago," said Klaus Maler, Siemens' 3G vice president for China. "The question is: How big will the portion for TD-SCDMA be in China?
"This is something on which there are a lot of different points of view. But from a technical point of view, it will happen in China. There should be no question about that." |
