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ADI rolls out TD-SCDMA communications chip set
By Mike Clendennin

EE Times
Nov 15, 2004


TAIPEI, Taiwan — U.S. chipmaker Analog Devices Inc. is rolling out a chipset for China's nascent 3G mobile communications standard in a move that is expected to put pressure on a cadre of small China-based firms pinning their hopes on what will initially be a niche market.

Like a host of other wireless companies, ADI is betting that Chinese regulators will issue 3G licenses sometime in the first half of 2005. The Chinese standard, known as TD-SCDMA (Time-Division " Synchronous Code-Division Multiple Access), is sure to be a component of at least one of the three or four licenses offered.

ADI said its chipset is already sampling and has been adopted in prototype handsets used to test the early system infrastructure. The company is also pushing into the general 3G market with an announcement today regarding a chipset based on the wideband-CDMA standard. Those chips will sample in the first half of 2005.



Both platforms will be powered by the company's well-known SoftFone DSP-based baseband processor, an analog chip, and the Othello direct-conversion RF chip set. The w-CDMA version, called SoftFone-W, will also support the EDGE, GPRS extensions to GSM as well as GSM.

One of the key features in the digital baseband will be particularly useful for the TD-SCDMA version, called the SoftFone-LCR. Because the baseband signal processing, including joint detection and decoding, is executed entirely in software running on an embedded Blackfin DSP core, the chip will be able to handle any changes in protocol specifications.

"There are no hardware accelerator blocks included in this chip and that's a big deal with a standard that's as new as TD-SCDMA, which could go through some revisions," said Doug Grant, director of business development for RF and wireless systems at ADI. "Anybody who has done a chip based on hardware is going to have to re-spin the chip and that can be an expensive and time-consuming process. We can make the changes in software."

However, like some other first-generation TD-SCDMA chipsets in the market, the SoftFone-LCR does not scale all the way up to 384-kbits per second of best-case data throughput that is the 3G specification. The TD-SCDMA standard allows for data transmission to run as high as 2-Mbit per second.

Grant declined to detail the throughput range of the SoftFone-LCR, but said ADI may boost it in a second iteration if TD-SCDMA handsets really gain traction.

That is a topic of much speculation. China has spent several years developing TD-SCDMA, which is now one of three 3G standards approved by the International Telecommunication Union. Backers have said TD-SCDMA should be cheaper to deploy and offer more bandwidth-efficiency than the other two standards, suiting it for deployment in China's dense cities.

But the newbie standard will have to battle the more entrenched standards of w-CDMA and CDMA2000 1X. Those two specifications are likely to be the path to 3G for China's two incumbent mobile carriers, China Mobile and China Unicom. TD-SCDMA technology will be a runner-up technology for one of the country's two fixed-line providers, China Telecom or China Netcom.

The issue of 3G network deployments in China has been a closely watched topic because tens of billions of dollars will be spent during the next several years on network roll-outs to reach the more than 300 million Chinese subscribers.

Many market observers thought licenses would be issued in 2004, but the government has held back, leading to speculation that it's waiting for further progress on its TD-SCDMA standard. Tests for infrastructure and handsets have been ongoing for much of the year, and reports from those tests have indicated that TD-SCDMA is still lagging, in part because of an early lack of chipsets for phones.

Despite expectations that the TD-SCDMA market will be quite small in the early days, several domestic and foreign companies are developing products to hedge their bets against its potential popularity. Now there are at least five companies that have come out with chipsets, some more complete than others.

Firms that have committed R&D dollars, either directly or through joint ventures, include Siemens AG, Nokia, Texas Instruments, LG Telecom, Philips Semiconductors, Samsung Electronics, Motorola Inc. and STMicroelectronics. Domestic firms include Huawei Technologies, ZTE Corp., UTStarcom and Datang Mobile Communications Equipment Co Ltd, which is credited with developing the standard in China.

ADI's Grant said TD-SCDMA may end up being more popular than people have initially thought, and he likened its potential to that of EDGE. Originally dismissed as superfluous, it has gained momentum among operators and handset makers as a transition between GPRS and full-blown 3G systems.

"So for a standard that wasn't supposed to be that important it got important pretty quickly," Grant said. "I don't want to go out on a limb and say that TD-SCDMA will be the next EDGE but it certainly does have a lot going for it. Even if it never gets used anywhere else but China, that's a pretty big market."

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