Cambridge-based power technology firm Nujira has
set its sights on the mobile handset market which could represent a
$1bn market for the five year old company.
Nujira originally designed its RF power
modulation technology to increase the efficiency of 650W power
amplifiers in 3G mobile basestations. It is now working on a lower
power version which should reduce cost and improve power efficiency
in next generation 3G LTE (long term evolution) mobile phones.
“We’ve been working on this for 12 months. It
will be in chipsets in one to two years and in handsets by 2011,”
Tim Haynes,
Nujira
CEO told EW.
“I am 100 per cent certain that we will get
design wins in the handset market,” said Haynes.
According to Haynes, the company’s technology,
known as HAT (high accuracy tracking), could more than double the
time between charges for next generation mobile phones.
After a period when handset battery life has
steadily increased with more power efficient designs, the situation
could be reversed with the next generation of 3G LTE multimedia
handsets.
How to put broadband on a 4G mobile
phone by Tim Haynes.
According to Haynes, there are as many as 14
frequency bands - ten FDD frequency bands and four different TDD
frequency bands - defined in 3GPP that can be used for LTE, and it
is likely that more bands will be added to this list such as 700MHz
in the US.
As current power amplifiers (PAs) can only
efficiently cover one or two bands a large number of amplifiers
will be needed in a multi-band 4G handset. “Already 3G handsets can
have as many as five power amplifiers,” said Haynes.
“So a cost effective wide-band RF power
amplifier is a key enabling technology for the creation of 4G
handsets and our technology will make it possible to replace five
or six narrow-band PAs with just one or two wide-band power
amplifiers,” said Haynes.
The technology has already been proven in the
basestation market where Haynes said the company has contracts with
10 basestation OEMs. For basestations Nujira has designed a high
efficiency, high power DC-DC converter module.
For the handset market, which is potentially
much higher volume, Haynes said the company will look at an IP
(intellectual property) approach which will see its technology
designed into more integrated silicon designs.
For the next few years the company’s main
business will come from its basestation design wins. Two are
confirmed and Haynes is confident of others before the end of the
year.
Haynes also said the company was developing a
version of the power modulator for use in DVB digital broadcast
transmitters.
“We will offer a PA module for the DVB digital
broadcast market that can deliver efficiencies of up to 45% in
broadcast transmitters. Current broadcast transmitters use linear
PA devices whose efficiencies rarely exceed 15-18%, even when
digital pre-distortion and linearization schemes are employed,”
said Haynes.
Haynes expects to have its IP-based power
modulator for handsets on the market by Mobile World Congress next
February.