Nanoradio and Jazz trumpet SiGe WLAN chips
Swedish design house Nanoradio and Jazz Semiconductor are working together on SiGe chips for wireless LAN support in handsets, further increasing the competition to GaAs in this area.
Combining the transceiver and power amplifier (PA) functions using Jazz s 0.35-micron SiGe BiCMOS process, Nanoradio says its second generation NRX511 chip has “an impressive small footprint”.
Newport Beach, California based foundry Jazz and its fabless collaborator are now ramping up production for initial customers, after design wins with several high-profile Asian mobile phone makers.“There have been other announcements around CMOS single chip transceivers, but here we've gone a step further and done away with the GaAs PA, using Jazz's SiGe BiCMOS technology,” said Johnny Johannson, Nanoradio's vice-president of operations.
“Given that we're targeting handsets, which have relatively low transmit power and high demands on battery life, we get exactly what we need from SiGe.”
Attaining the right performance took an extensive development process, according to Johansson, both in terms of designing the chip s architecture, and in finding a foundry partner whose technology gave Nanoradio the optimal combination of cost, size and power.
Established in 2004, many of Nanoradio s 75 staff have experience of working at Nokia and Ericsson and therefore knew what they wanted from a foundry, and that Jazz was well positioned to perform the job.
The two companies have also worked together on Nanoradio s first-generation NRX510 WLAN chips since early 2006, selling them into multimedia players from Sharp and LG Innotek amongst others.
Technology research group Gartner predicts that 25 to 30 percent of all handsets will contain WLAN functionality by 2010, approximately equivalent to a volume of 400 million units. Johannson says, with its small, low power consumption second-generation SiGe chips already fully qualified, Nanoradio stands to take a substantial part of this market.
