Qualcomm
Broadcom Breaks Into Top-Five Smartphone Chip Supplier Rankings in Q3 2011
Strategy Analytics released their Q3 2011 global smartphone apps processor market share numbers and based on their estimates, the market grew 59 percent on a year-on-year basis to reach $2.24 billion in Q3 2011.
Qualcomm, Samsung, Texas Instruments (TI), Marvell and Broadcom took the top-five places in unit share terms in Q3 2011.
Qualcomm to cover all tiers of smartphones and tablets with new Snapdragon processors
Android Guys report Qualcomm announced their new next-gen Snapdragon S4 mobile processors today along with enhancements to their S1 line. Qualcomm aims to enhance user experience and improve battery life across all tiers of smartphones and tablets with their faster, more efficient processors. Qualcomm’s S4 processors will feature their next-gen Krait CPU which will provide next-gen [...]
Analyst: Infineon, TI are second tier in mobile chips
EE Times reports Infineon, Marvell, Renesas and Texas Instruments are forming the second tier of chip suppliers to the mobile phone industry and the mobile business units of these companies are potentially liable to merger and acquisition activity, according to Mike Bryant, an analyst with Future Horizons.
Companies with even less [...]
LTE Patent Battle
DailyWireless reports The dream of driving down LTE royalty levels dramatically is fading, says Caroline Gabriel at Rethink Research. Intel and Samsung have sought to spearhead an open, transparent and low royalty structure for WiMAX patents and formed the Open Patent Alliance (OPA) in June 2008.
That doesn’t seem to be the case with LTE. Qualcomm [...]
Qualcomm Chipset ASP
Source: Morgan Stanley
Qualcomm reported a surprisingly weak FQ1 with even weaker FQ2 guidance as a lower ASPs for both handsets and chips drove revenue of $2,67B below our $2.77B estimate. Normalizing for $71M in out-of-period revenue boost from the new Samsung contract, “true” revenue of $2.6B was even lower, however within guidance of $2.55-2.75B.
Baseband Market Share by Revenue
Source: Merrill Lynch, BofA, IDC
The exit of Freescale and TI has left the baseband market concentrated around six vendors: Qualcomm, Mediatek, Infineon, Marvell, ST-Ericsson and Broadcom.
While we expect Qualcomm to further consolidate its high market share (through an increased presence at Motorola, share gains at Nokia), we believe that emerging vendors, namely Broadcom and Mediatek [...]
AT&T/TerreStar Ready Satphone Service
Daily Wireless reports that AT&T Mobility will resell satellite service and phones from TerreStar Networks, by the end of this year. TerreStar is scheduled to launch its first monster satellite on July 1st. It uses satellite/cellular handsets designed to be about the same size as a conventional smartphone.
Using licensed 2GHz radio spectrum, it will [...]
VZW easing data caps, launching netbooks
Telephony Unfiltered reports Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ, NYSE:VOD) wants you to buy a wireless netbook. To entice you, it is easing up on its data usage restrictions. The CDMA operator today announced plans to offer the HP Mini 1151NR netbook with embedded 3G in stores, starting Sunday, and while it isn’t doing away with data caps [...]
Sandbridge SDR Selected as ACE/EE Times Insight Award Finalist
Under the category of Most Innovative Mobile Processor, Sandbridge Technologies SB3500 was selected as one of the EE Times Insight Award 2008 finalists.
Here is the full list:
Sandbridge SB3500 Flexible Baseband Processor
Intel 45nm Atom Processor
Qualcomm QSD8650 Mobile Processor (Snapdragon Platform)
Samsung S5L8900B01 Applications Processor
Texas Instruments 65nm OMAP3530 Applications Processor
I wonder if a “productivity factor” can be used [...]
Mobile World Congress (MWC): Observations from Barcelona
Last week the wireless industry met in Barcelona for the annual Mobile World Congress. I had the good fortune to attend the show and my company Sandbridge was an exhibitor.
The big announcement at the show was Nokia’s license to Broadcom of their modem IP. This legitimizes Broadcom’s cellular offerings on top of an already strong [...]