Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Ericsson overlook? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greywolf who wrote (4823)	9/13/2001 8:26:52 AM
From: Jim Oravetz	Respond to of 5390

Ericsson turns to TI to develop phone chip set business By Peter Clarke EE Times (09/07/01, 1:22 p.m. EST) eetimes.com LONDON - Ericsson plans to work closely with Texas Instruments Inc. as it moves out of mobile phone handsets and into emerging businesses for phone chip sets and reference designs. The troubled Swedish telecom giant said Tuesday (Sept. 4) that it will sell chip sets and software through a new company, Ericsson Mobile Platforms, which will also license reference designs and other Ericsson intellectual property for GSM, GPRS, Edge and 3G handsets. TI's baseband technology will be a fundamental part of the offering, Ericsson said, under a memorandum of understanding signed by both companies. The move is part of a major restructuring at Ericsson. Earlier this year the company said it will stop making mobile phone handsets and sell that business to a joint venture in which it shares ownership evenly with Sony Corp. The new Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Ltd. starts operations Oct. 1. "We will bring our solutions to the Sony-Ericsson joint venture, but also to the open market," Ericsson's chief technology officer, Jan Uddenfeldt, said at a company technology conference here. "The phone business is becoming very similar to the PC industry, where there are few companies that can do the basic chip technology and software and many companies making the end products. We can offer the leading-edge technology for 2G, 2.5G, 3G." Uddenfeldt likened the transformation of the handset market to what occurred to the PC in the early '90s, with the emergence of an independent motherboard industry and branded PC assemblers. "Today's announcement extends the deployment of Ericsson's and TI's industry-leading baseband technologies," said Tord Wingren, president of Ericsson Mobile Platforms. "TI's wireless digital signal processor and analog products and proven semiconductor manufacturing have enabled superior performance in Ericsson phones for more than a decade." Ericsson's move comes after Motorola Inc. announced last month that it will offer mobile handset technology to other OEMs and contract designers. TI has offered the Open Multimedia Application Platform (OMAP), based on its own DSP technology, ARM RISC processor cores and the Epoc operating system from Symbian Ltd., for two years. Asked how Ericsson would differentiate its offerings from TI's OMAP, Uddenfeldt said that Ericsson offers a full solution while TI does not. "They need the system-level expertise of Ericsson," he said, calling his company's commitment to TI "very strong." "The Ericsson solution is being offered to mobile phone companies and backed up by Texas Instruments in terms of semiconductor manufacturing and DSP technology," Uddenfeldt said. But analysts at Ericsson's technology symposium this week said the deal with TI, memorandum notwithstanding, appeared temporary. "For now, Texas Instruments needs Ericsson," one analyst said, "but it is desperately trying to build up its own systems knowledge."