Items tagged with Icera
Qualcomm is a dominant player in the mobile market when it comes to SoCs and 3G/4G basebands. In the baseband sector alone, Qualcomm held a commanding 61 percent of the global market in Q1 2015. However, the European Commission is a bit suspicious of Qualcomm’s dominance and is accusing the American company of impropriety with regards to its operations. The European Commission’s preliminary findings show that Qualcomm illegally gave money to a [currently] unnamed smartphone OEM in an effort to ensure that only its 3G and LTE baseband chips were used, effectively blocking any other competitors. In addition, the exclusivity clause is still in place according to the European Commission. And if that...
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NVIDIA, a major player in the graphics chip market, announced today that it's winding down its Icera modem operations in the second quarter of its fiscal 2016 and is open to selling off the technology. So ends NVIDIA's short-lived plans to break into the smartphone market, as it's now focused on other categories, including gaming, automotive, and cloud computing. The chip maker acquired UK-based Icera in 2011 for $367 million and, at the time, had big plans of getting into mobile. Icera was an attractive buy for NVIDIA because of its baseband technology, and in particular its line of software modems that could be used in a number of wireless devices. Part of NVIDIA's hope was to bake Icera into...
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This week, Broadcom announced that it would exit the LTE modem market and shut down its LTE research division. The move comes less than a year after Broadcom bought Renesas' (formerly known as NEC) LTE modem -- and that purchase was supposed to give Broadcom a leg up in modem design after its own in-house LTE product had failed to ship. With Broadcom gone, Qualcomm is, for all intents and purposes, the Emperor of LTE mountain. The market shift has happened quickly -- look at where revenue share sat in 2009, when 4G was still on the horizon and 3G modems were the norm. Qualcomm is still the leading provider, no question, but ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, MediaTek, and Infineon all have...
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It's been a year since Nvidia took the wraps off Tegra 4i, its first smartphone design with an integrated software modem, quad-core Cortex-A9 processor, and a slightly smaller version of the Tegra 4 mobile GPU used in devices like Nvidia's Shield. At the time, Nvidia promised that we'd see devices out by the end of the year. Today, the company is finally announcing its first partner for the new phone -- the European telecom Wiko. Wiko is a relative newcomer to the French telecommunications market but passed the million-customer mark last year, with plans to double that by the end of 2014. It's a subsidiary of Chinese telecom Tinno, and the partnership with Nvidia may be one of the company's first...
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Nvidia and ZTE are both giddy as all get-out to unveil the latter's new Mimosa X, purportedly the world's first smartphone to incorporate both an NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor and the GPU maker's Icera modem, which comes fresh off of NVIDIA's acquisition of Icera in mid-2011. "The ZTE Mimosa X is exciting for a few reasons," said Michael Rayfield, General Manager of the Mobile business at NVIDIA. "The Mimosa X marks the first time NVIDIA technology powers all the major processors in a single smartphone, and also the first time a premium mobile computing experience is coming to the mainstream smartphone market." If you're reading this, you're likely already familiar with Tegra 2, which is a dual-core...
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Nvidia announced today that it's acquiring the fabless semiconductor design firm Icera. The UK-based company specializes in soft modem chipsets for a variety of devices, including laptops, netbooks, tablets, and smartphones. The two companies have a history of cooperation; Icera announced Tegra-compatible wireless chipsets back in 2009. Nvidia's Phil Carmack writes: "This is a significant step forward in NVIDIA’s strategy to be the processor company for the post-PC era... Icera’s baseband and RF technologies span 2G, 3G and 4G networks... Icera’s programmable baseband processor architecture will allow NVIDIA and its OEM customers to innovate and adapt signaling algorithms in...
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