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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: quartersawyer who wrote (56363)	10/25/2006 8:32:06 PM
From: Jon Koplik	Respond to of 196961

WSJ -- China Enters Mobile-TV Fray .................................................. October 26, 2006 China Enters Mobile-TV Fray Competition May Heat Up to Develop Dominant Global Standard By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER and JANE SPENCER HONG KONG -- As telecom companies and broadcasters around the globe rush to offer television services over mobile phones, China is taking steps to ensure that its domestic players don't miss out on the potentially massive market. Chinese broadcast authorities this week announced they will launch their own technology standard for mobile TV. The Chinese standard is still in early stages of development. [commentary from Jon : Idiots, idiots, idiots !] Regulators didn't suggest the domestic standard would be the only one allowed in China. But the existence of a Chinese standard could ratchet up competition between companies in the scramble to develop a dominant global standard for mobile TV. Nokia Corp. of Finland and Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea, for example, have already invested heavily in deploying mobile-TV services in other parts of the world. "The Chinese government wants to spin off as much homegrown technology as possible," says Claus Mortensen, research manager for market tracker IDC in Hong Kong. China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television didn't respond to a request for an interview. China has tried this homegrown approach to technology standards before. It has been working for several years to develop its own standard for so-called third-generation wireless networks -- the high-speed networks used to deliver games, video clips and other data services to cellphones. But with alternative 3G approaches advancing more quickly in other countries, the Chinese standard -- not yet launched commercially -- isn't the only one being developed in China. Cellphone service providers and broadcasters world-wide are trying to settle on the technology and business models behind providing video content on cellphones. China is the world's largest cellphone market, and analysts think its consumers may be particularly receptive to mobile-TV services, since few have existing pay-TV subscriptions, and because cellphone services beyond voice are extremely popular in China. One option for delivering video to cellphones is to stream or download video clips over advanced 2.5G and 3G networks. In China, the influential Shanghai Media Group has begun trials providing its content to cellphones with this technology. Another option is to broadcast video with a technology that works the way digital radio does. South Korea was the first country to roll out such a service, in 2005, using satellite and terrestrial versions of a Samsung Electronics-backed system called Digital Media Broadcasting. As of March, more than 500,000 handsets outfitted for the service had been sold. Qualcomm Inc. has launched a proprietary mobile-TV service called MediaFLO in the U.S. In Europe and Asia, an industry group that includes Nokia has been touting a standard called DVB-H. More than 50 million DVB-H phones are expected to be sold globally by 2010, according to estimates from Research firm Informa. The planned Chinese standard, which bears the ungainly name GY/T220.1-2006, could help local telecom providers, such as China Mobile Ltd. and China Netcom Ltd., by reducing the amount of money they have to pay in royalty and intellectual-property fees to foreign companies, according to Sandy Shen, a telecom analyst with Gartner in Shanghai. But both Nokia and Motorola Inc. of the U.S. said that the announcement would have little impact on their plans to expand mobile-TV services in China and the rest of the world. "It is very natural that China is looking after its own interests in this area," says Juha Lipiainen, Nokia's Greater China director of mobile-TV business development. Motorola called the move "just another proof point that no single transmission standard will dominate the landscape for mobile TV." --Helena Yu in Shanghai and Sue Feng in Beijing contributed to this article. Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com and Jane Spencer at jane.spencer@wsj.com Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

To: quartersawyer who wrote (56363)	10/28/2006 3:34:33 AM
From: waitwatchwander	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 196961

WIRELESS: China ICs, tester raise prospects for TD-SCDMA By Mike Clendenin mobilehandsetdesignline.com Courtesy of EE Times (10/23/2006 9:00 AM EDT) Shanghai, China -- Although the future of China's domestic 3G standard is still uncertain, a few more roadblocks have been cast aside with the pending release of a Chinese single-chip transceiver IC and the introduction of a TD-SCDMA field tester. Shanghai-based Comlent Technology Inc. will release two chips this week--an RF transceiver (CL4020) and an analog baseband (CL4520). This means that two local companies--the other being Rising Microelectronics Co. Ltd.--will have TD-SCDMA transceiver technology available, something the government considers an important factor when determining the issuance of third-generation licenses. One of the main holdups in commercializing 3G in China is the readiness of time-division synchronous code-division multiple access (TD-SCDMA), long considered the underdog standard because of the relatively small amount of R&D funds invested in it. Silicon is slowly coming into the market, but network testing has been slow. Late last month, an important step forward was made on that front when Tektronix Inc. said it would add TD-SCDMA as an option to its NetTek Wireless RF Field Tester. Tektronix believes it is the first company to offer TD-SCDMA RF field test and measurement in a handheld form, which should make it easier for companies to diagnose Node B transmitter problems. Government-controlled operators have been testing the TD-SCDMA standard for at least three years. The third, and latest, round of testing is due to wrap up in December. One of the key problems remains reliable connections between terminals and the networks, especially at data rates above 128 kbits/second. The lack of a strong test environment has hindered a quick solution to those problems. A number of chip companies have rolled out silicon for the TD-SCDMA market, but the Chinese government is eager to see local companies benefit from its local standard. So even though companies like ADI and Maxim have TD-SCDMA transceivers ready, that part of the IC design chain was still considered a bottleneck by Chinese officials. Until now, TD-SCDMA transceivers have been based on BiCMOS technology, making it easier to integrate the power amplifier. Most have also been single-band implementations. Comlent's release will differentiate itself by being based on RF CMOS technology and by being a dual-band solution--1880 to 1920 MHz and 2010 to 2025 MHz. China's Rising Microelectronics Co. Ltd. also has a dual-band solution, but it is based on SiGe. Comlent used BiCMOS technology in its first chips for the Personal Handyphone System market, a digital cordless telephone system first developed in Japan. The company started down that path for the TD-SCDMA platform, but decided to switch over to RF CMOS. (It has also used RF CMOS for a 2.4-GHz cordless-phone transceiver.) The transition begs the question of whether it will look to build up a baseband team and pursue further integration, but the company is not fully tipping its hand on that yet. "For simple products, such as our FM radio receiver, we are able to do the backend digital part and are already developing the SoC [system-on-chip] in-house," said Chen Kai, Comlent's CEO. "For the more complicated basebands, such as with W-CDMA or TD-SCDMA, we are working closely with partners. So it is a hybrid approach." However, it is already clear that competitors are aggressively moving to reduce the chip counts in reference designs to drive down the costs of TD-SCDMA, which will start out with a disadvantage because of its lower economy of scale. Comlent will probably need to move beyond alliances on the digital side to remain competitive. The Comlent transceiver is based on 0.18-micron technology. It uses a direct-conversion architecture that integrates the voltage-controlled oscillator, fractional-N phase-locked loop, a receive channel select filter and a transmit driver amplifier into a single chip, according to Li Zhenbiao, vice president of engineering at Comlent. The power amplifier is external. Li said that one of the key challenges for his team during the two-year development phase was handling dc offset on the receiver. "To remove the dc offset, a high-pass filter is adopted by some solutions. But this causes signal distortion and thus cannot support HSDPA [high-speed downlink packet access]," he said. Comlent's solution "is to utilize digital detection and cancellation loop." To do this, the analog baseband IC uses digital signal processing logic to compensate for the imperfections in the analog channel-select filter and to perform dc-offset calibration, he said. The noise is then suppressed in the digital domain. Comlent believes that leveraging the digital domain makes it easier to design the analog circuits while also reducing power and area. Comlent plans to release engineering samples of its chips in mid-November, targeting mass production for the third quarter of 2007.