Industry needs to settle dispute over IP ownership between Qualcomm and Ericsson and present a united marketing front to the world for CDMA. Clearly, the agreement will give Ericsson a competitive position against the likes of Lucent, Motorola, Nortel and Samsung. One could argue the market share projections for the various
remaining standards, but it seems clear that there will be multi modes with incompatibilities for a long time.
As operators are scrambling to add new, enhanced services, they are buying equipment that supports the current second generation (2G) digital cellular standards, GSM, TDMA, CDMA and PCD. In
spite of the Qualcomm/Ericsson agreement to converge their technologies to a single air interface, the major emerging third generation (3G) W-CDMA standard will require support of 3 different modes and technology implementations:
Japanese wideband CDMA, European UTRA wideband CDMA, and US cdma2000. As a result, basestation, handset and semiconductor component manufacturers are forced to undertake costly R & D initiatives to develop products that support these new standards. Network operators must buy disparate basestations that are costly to acquire and maintain.
Morphics' Dynamically Reconfigurable Logic (DRL) technology enables
architectures that address these challenges. The Morphics technology enables wireless equipment manufacturers to support multiple air interface protocols with reduced costs. Using the adaptive solution from Morphics, basestation and handset manufacturers can design consolidated product platforms that can dynamically reconfigure themselves to handle any protocol.
Further proof of the broad application of the Morphics technology is evidenced
in the recent commitment to finance the technology from industry related venture funds - GSM Capital (a cellular focused fund funded by 9 leading GSM operators, including France Telecom, Deutsche Telecom and Sing Tel) and BCE Capital (the telecommunications venture investment of Bell Canada and Nortel Networks).
Heavy technical and strategic due diligence was undertaken by these investors and the commitment was made in spite of the “one standard” proposed by Qualcomm/Ericsson. |
