29th
October
2010
Broadcom has paid $86m net of cash for Israeli femtocell IC specialist Percello in a bid to lower the BOM, and accelerate time to market, for its femtocell chip offerings. This comes close on the heels of acquiring the WiMAX prpovder, Beceem Communications.
The big fabless company’s acquisition does signify an endorsing of a real demand for femtocells. It is also now well positioned to take advantage of the relationship Percello has already cultivated with Ubiquisys, probably the number one in femtocell access point vendors.
Linley Gwennap, founder and principal analyst at Linley Group had correctly predicted in a talk to EETimes earlier -“The incremental cost of the femto function would be around $10. This could ultimately require the femto processor to integrate Ethernet and Wi-Fi as well as DSL or cable-modem. Broadcom is the obvious company to develop such a chip.”
Interconnectivity is getting more and more interesting! And hey, this is Broadcom’s sixth acquisition in Israel – and it already has 3 development centres there.
posted in Semiconductor, Business, Communciation, Mergers & Acquistions, 3G |
17th
October
2007
Broadcom Corp has announced that it has developed an integrated 3G high-speed wireless cell phone chip ahead of bigger rivals like TI and Qualcomm. The news has sent up its shares by as much as 3 percent while those of TI and Qualcomm dropped.
The BCM21551 combines a 3G baseband transceiver, Bluetooth 2.1, and a multiband RF transceiver on a single chip. The chip also includes an FM radio transmitter & receiver for playback through a car stereo as well as support for a 5 megapixel camera, and advanced multimedia processing. Support for WiFi or GPS will need to come from a separate chip. The chip is available for customer testing and poses a competitive threat to other wireless chip makers like Infineon, NXP and Freescale. Analysts have been guessing off-late when a 3G iPhone might arrive (Apple’s recent deal with Interdigital has fuelled rumours of a 3G iPhone debut around Christmas this year). Broadcom expects the first phones using BCM21551 to come on the market in 2009. So while most likely the first set of 3G iPhones will have the 3G radio equipment provided by Infineon chipsets, the market may soon see other handsets with this integrated chip.
posted in Product, 3G |
