Icera wins baseband design-in
electronicsweekly.com
Thursday 1 May 2008
Icera Semiconductor, the Bristol wireless chip start-up, has achieved its first design win for a baseband in a wireless handset and is looking to raise another $60m in capital funding this year.
“We have got a design win for a phone’s baseband”, Nigel Toon, vice president of marketing at Icera, told EW. He would not say from which company.
It is a significant step for Icera because, up to now, its design wins have been in data card applications and many people in the wireless industry thought that handset designers would be reluctant to design in a baseband from a start-up company.
The handset design win is for a smart phone and the Icera chip-set will give the phone the capacity for both HSDPA and HSUPA. The only other company actually shipping chip-sets with both HSDPA and HSUPA is Qualcomm. “We have clear performance leadership,” said Toon.
With the recent Sirifics acquisition, Icera now has the capability to do all the main building blocks of a wireless device, i.e. the baseband, the power management and the RF transceiver. “60 per cent of the BOM (bill of materials) is owned by Icera”, said Toon.
Helping Icera add design wins is the fact that major wireless carriers in all the main regions have certified the Icera platform as conforming with their approvals processes.
“We showed the carriers that we can bring a performance advantage of faster downloads and so, because the user is off the network quicker, it frees up bandwidth for other users”, said Toon, “so they enrolled us in their approvals processes and pre-approved our devices for their networks. That allowed us to get our devices out into markets.”
Icera is now set on raising another $60m on top of the $140m it has already raised. “We had intended to IPO in 2009”, said Toon, “but then we decided to acquire Sirifics and accelerate our engineering investment and delay the IPO to 2010, and this year we’re going to raise $60m plus.”
Toon said investors had already expressed interest including ‘strategic investors’ i.e. customers/suppliers. Asked if a possible strategic investor might include a handset manufacturer, Toon replied: “It’s possible |
