The Icera-Sirific
tie-up, announced today, will enable the two companies to produce
an integrated RF plus baseband product which will go after the data
card market share of Qualcomm.
"Carriers are definitely looking for diversity of supply in the
data card space, where Qualcomm have an almost 100 per cent market
share", Stan Boland, CEO of Icera, told Electronics Weekly, "we
have a technically superior product to the Qualcomm product, our
product is smaller, cheaper and with better performance than
Qualcomm. We expect to have 33 per cent market share in the data
card space by the end of next year."
Icera has been working with Sirific for about a year in developing
a joint product. Sirific does the RF front end and Icera the
baseband chip.
Asked why, if they already had a joint product, they also needed
joint ownership of the two companies, Boland replied: "For three
reasons: first, the customers like to get their chip-set from one
company; second, we can price bundle when selling the combined
chip-set; third, we can develop a road map with a higher level of
integration."
Asked what that integration would involve, Boland replied:
"Currently our baseband chip co-packages two die, a digital die,
and an analogue die which talks to the radio front end. We could
remove the analogue die, and talk directly from the digital die to
the radio die."
The merger of Icera and Sirific has been done by giving
Sirific's shareholders a chunk of Icera stock.
Boland remains as CEO of the joint company and Sirific co-founder,
Tajinder Manku, joins the board of Icera as hand of the RF and
analogue division.
Icera management will run the combined company, and Sirific's
design teams in Canada and Texas are moving over to Icera.
The value of the Icera stock given to Sirific's shareholders is
not revealed. Sirific is a pre-revenue company and was expecting to
get its first revenue from the joint product it has been developing
with Icera.
Sirific has raised $63m in venture funding, and
Icera has raised $142m.
The opportunity to get into the data card space comes as the
wireless carriers are looking to diversify their supplier base.
Qualcomm has been involved in many lawsuits with the telecoms
industry, principally Broadcom and Nokia, with Qualcomm losing most
of the cases and, and at one point, US courts stopping cellphones
containing Qualcomm chips being shipped into the US.
This is one reason why wireless network carriers are looking to
diversify supplies, so they can be guaranteed secure, legally
unchallengeable, sources of supply.
"We are a Qualcomm licensee", added Boland, "so we can ship with
a full Qualcomm licence with no fear of any litigation from
Qualcomm."
See also:
Q5 Interview - Stan Boland, Icera
Semiconductor