Friday, October 16, 2015
A strategy of what might be called a protective — or pre-emptive — investment in the latest modem technology is Intel Corporation’s apparent key to survival in the mobile business.
This is exactly what Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said Tuesday (Oct. 13) during the Q3 financial announcement. Referring to the cutthroat modem business, he noted: “It’s not as much about how many players are in it, it’s about keeping that yearly cadence and keeping the technologies in place at the leading edge.”
Intel’s modem business has been, thus far, sorely missing CDMA technology, originally invented by Qualcomm.
Earlier this month, VIA Telecom in Taipei quietly announced the sale of part of its assets to Intel, among which were the CDMA assets of Via Telecom.
As Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts noted, “CDMA is required for any smartphone on Verizon’s huge network.” CDMA is also required elsewhere in some networks in Taiwan, Korea, and for China Telecom — paired with LTE, he added. "Without CDMA, Intel cannot be a major player in the LTE modem market.”
As a spokesman at CEVA confirmed, the Via Telecom CDMA modems are based on CEVA DSP cores. Intel’s modem chips — based on the 2G/3G modems Intel acquired from Infineon in January, 2011 -- are also using CEVA’s DSP core.
When asked about Via Telecom-Intel deal, the CEVA spokesman explained that Via Telecom’s business has been “strongly focused on modem,” although the Taiwanese company has some apps and possibly some SoC experience. “That may or may not be useful to Intel,” he said. The main focus of the Via Telecom-Intel deal is adding the CDMA/EV-DO stack to Intel’s chips, he observed.
It’s important to note that only Qualcomm and MediaTek have so-called “world modems” that include CDMA. Marvell has been fielding mobile SoCs integrated with five basebands, but without CDMA.
According to Strauss, MediaTek “was smart enough to earlier incorporate Via Telecom’s CDMA modem in its LTE product line.” That deal “paid off handsomely for MediaTek” getting design wins into China Telecom, he explained.
Strauss believes that earlier market speculation about Intel’s LTE modems appearing in a percentage of next year’s iPhones — which did not take into account that most iPhones must also have a CDMA capability — will be revived.
Strauss expects to see the first silicon — integrated with CDMA — from Intel in the first half of 2016.
By: DocMemory
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