Comlent brings high-end RF to China
Cell phone chip house pledges to elevate country's design expertise
By Mike Clendenin
EBN
(11/17/2003 12:00 PM EST)
A small Shanghai-based start-up working on RF chips hopes to capture 50% of China's fast-growing PHS cellular handset market, which today stands at roughly 23 million users and is growing by about 2 million users a month.
Led by a core group of overseas Chinese, Comlent Technology Inc. is looking to displace Japan to become the top supplier to China's home-grown handset makers, such as market leader UT Starcom. Comlent joins a small but growing number of Asia-Pacific start-ups that are tackling complex RF design.
Comlent is a tangible result of the Chinese government's policy to lure Chinese expatriates home by offering them corporate and personal incentives. The aim is to build a base of experts who can train local engineers and help seed the country's nascent IC design industry.
China already claims to have about 400 IC design houses, but most industry insiders say the number of serious players is well below 100. Only a handful have annual revenue of more than $10 million, and most are doing low-end, copycat designs for white-box goods and are not adept at identifying new market opportunities.
Kai Chen, Comlent's chief executive, said his company is trying to differentiate itself by bringing technology innovation to the table and mixing it with China's lower cost structure. "We're not just using Chinese labor to make the chip 10% cheaper; we're revolutionizing the whole architecture," he said.
Comlent wants to seize on an often heard complaint among PHS users in China: dropped calls. Current RF chips used in PHS cell phones communicate with just one cell site at a time, Chen said. Comlent's chip, which will use direct-conversion (zero-IF) technology, will simultaneously talk with four cell sites.
The single-chip, direct-conversion implementation, which puts the onus on the radio to bring the zero-IF, intelligence-only signal to the baseband, should deliver a cost advantage over superheterodyne, two-chip methods. With that, Chen estimates he can reduce the handset bill of materials by 10% to 20%.
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