Icera Semiconductor launches its first complete wireless chipset today, incorporating the RF front end chip which it acquired with its recent purchase of Canadian RF chip specialist house Sirifics.

"With Sirifics, we have the radio piece as well", Nigel Toon, vice president of marketing at Icera told Electronics Weekly, "we can now deliver the baseband processor, the power management chip, and the RF transceiver, all from Icera in one chip-set."

Icera calls the chip-set the Livanto ICE8040 and is sampling it to customers. The reason it can bring out the chip-set with the RF front end, so soon after the Sirifics takeover, is because Icera and Sirifics have been working on co-developing the chip for over a year.

The new chip-set, fabbed on a 65nm CMOS process, delivers HSDPA up to 7.2Mbps, HSUPA up to 5.7Mbps, and supports GSM, GPRS, EDGE and WCDMA. Complete system standby power in 3G idle mode is under 1mA.

Icera has already got a handset design win for the chip-set. It is not revealing the manufacturer but, according to Toon, the design is for a smart-phone supporting HSDPA and HSUPA.

Apart from Qualcomm, Icera is the only company shipping both HSDPA and HSUPA and: "We have clear performance leadership", said Toon.

Getting the RF part in place gives Icera a major chunk of the IC content needed for wireless devices. "We've now got the three most important pieces," said Toon, "that's 60 per cent of the BOM (bill of materials) owned by Icera."

As well as the chipset, Icera is launching a reference design today which gives end equipment manufacturers a complete design for USB dongles and embedded PCI minicard modules for laptops and mobile Internet devices. Icera calls the reference design Espresso 300.

Datacards have been the initial market for Icera. The company reckons that 22m data cards were sold last year, and 45m to 50m will be sold this year.

Icera has a full Qualcomm license and sees a big opportunity coming up in a few years when the CDMA-LTE transition will be underway, and when people will want composite CDMA/LTE devices.

"When we come out with LTE in two to three years time there will be a whole lot of CDMA operators looking to move to LTE", said Toon.

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