News on relationship between Aware, 3com and TI
Inter@ctive Week
By Carol Wilson
Texas Instrument Inc.'s bold entry into the Digital Subscriber Line market
could well affect a multitude of players in the manufacturing community, due to
the complex ties created among companies that make chip sets, core
technology or network systems.
For example, months before it acquired Amati Communications Corp., Texas
Instruments (TI) signed a strategic alliance with 3Com Corp. and Aware Inc.
to develop Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) technology.
According to James Collinge, the Amati acquisition and subsequent alliance
with Westell Technologies Inc. will not change TI's relationship with 3Com.
"The goal of that arrangement was to develop a product that bridged the gap
between 56-kilobit-per-second modems and ADSL systems," Collinge says.
"If anything, the agreement between TI and Amati will only mean that 3Com
will get our product sooner."
Less certain, says analyst Daniel Briere, president of TeleChoice Inc.
(www.telechoice.com), is how TI's move will affect Aware and its chip-set
partner, Analog Devices Inc.
The TI move would seem to be bad news for Motorola Semiconductor,
which held a strong early position in ADSL chip technology, having licensed
Amati's ADSL patents well ahead of the rest of the industry and begun work
on an ambitious Application Specific Integrated Circuit approach to ADSL.
Not so, says Debbie Sallee, strategic marketing manager of broadband
operations at Motorola.
"Basically, it looks to us like TI has purchased Amati for cash, and because
they believe the same thing we do -- this is going to be a huge market," she
says. "We see this as a defensive move by TI."
Motorola's CopperGold chip set is in prototype stage with samples expected
by the end of the year. Sallee admits there have been delays but says
Motorola has kept to the schedule it announced in July.
She says CopperGold will compete with any general-purpose digital signal
processor (DSP) solution that TI may design, particularly in price and power
consumption.
"Our solution is a DSP inside of a chip which has peripherals on it that
off-load some of the processing capability," Sallee says.
Systems built on the CopperGold solution could have some of the
upgradability of DSP-based solutions if they include flash memory in the
modem board, she adds.
"You are not going to have the flexibility you get with a general-purpose DSP,
but a DSP comes with a penalty of cost and power consumption," Sallee
says.
She says some of the sudden activity to sign up new partners reflects the stage
of market maturity -- as real deployment grows closer, customers naturally
look for multiple suppliers.
Briere says, however, that the TI move may reverberate through the industry
and cause multiple players to re-examine where they are headed. The good
news, he adds, is that TI's actions "obviously validate how huge this market
will be -- they paid $400 million for the technology, and you'd have to sell a
lot of units just to recap $400 million," he says. "TI sees this as a $6 billion
opportunity." |
