Sequans ties with Fujitsu for LTE chips
French baseband firm unveils broad 4G platforms, turns to Japanese partner for RF and market reach
Published: 21 October, 2011
READ MORE: Semiconductor | LTE
Most of the group of specialist baseband chip firms which grew up around WiMAX have now been acquired, but Sequans remains independent, made an IPO earlier this year, and has been involved in some major TD-LTE trials. Now the French firm has shown off its new LTE platform, the most complete offering to date in its strategy to leverage WiMAX expertise for the larger 4G standard, and has signed a valuable technology and marketing deal with Fujitsu Semiconductor.
Fujitsu was also an early leading light in WiMAX silicon, and like its compatriot Renesas (which bought Nokia's modem unit) is looking to reassert itself in the handset chip sector, via basebands and its RF products. Fujitsu is gaining, through this new partnership, in-depth expertise in 4G and OFDM technologies, and will integrate the new Sequans LTE baseband with its own 2G/3G/LTE RF solution. This, in turn, will enable Sequans to target almost any of the many LTE bands used around the world, from 700MHz to above 3.5GHz, in TDD or FDD mode.
"Our collaboration with Fujitsu Semiconductor ensures that our customers can adopt our LTE baseband solution to build devices for virtually any LTE spectrum band around the world," said Sequans CEO Georges Karam. "Furthermore, our mutual customers will benefit from this global multimode, multiband solution in terms of cost efficiency and shorter time to market due to the pre-integration and validation work Sequans has completed on the combined solution."
The initial combined offering users Fujitsu's MB86L12A RF CMOS transceiver and Sequans' SQN3110 and SQN3120 baseband systems-on-chip. The SQN3110, or Andromeda, is a new 40nm LTE chip supporting 3GPP Release 9 and category 4 throughput (up to 150Mbps), with reduced footprint and power consumption to make it suited to small handsets. The SQN3120, or Mont Blanc, adds an integrated applications processor and is geared to larger devices plus CPE, personal hotspots and USB modems.
The chips are ready to support Voice over LTE and come with complete LTE protocol stack and host software. Sequans also offers the SQN5110 which combines WiMAX with FDD/TDD LTE as part of the Andromeda platform for small devices. This is the industry's first single die, dual-mode WiMAX/LTE solution, says Sequans, no doubt with an eye on operators migrating from the older 4G standard to LTE, among them Clearwire. Also supporting such projects is a broader migration and coexistence initiative which Sequans calls 4Sight.
Like the other independent survivor of the WiMAX boom, Altair, Sequans has initially focused on harnessing the TDD expertise acquired in 802.16. While Altair has seen success with Japan's 4G successor to PHS, as deployed by Softbank in combination with LTE, Sequans has focused on TD-LTE and provided device silicon for China Mobile's major showcase network at Shanghai World Expo last year. To work with Andromeda or Mont Blanc, the firm offers the SQN3140 RF transceiver for TD-LTE. For FD-LTE and for combinations with 3G and 2G, Sequans relies on third party RFs such as Fujitsu's.
Sequans' new LTE solutions will be available for sampling in December.
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