Philips to develop 3G chipset for China

Philips Semiconductors and Huawei Technologies have signed an agreement to jointly develop a 3G ASIC chipset.

Philips Semiconductors and Huawei Technologies have signed an agreement to jointly develop a 3G ASIC chipset.

The agreement between the two companies in the ASICs field reaffirms Philips Semiconductors' commitment to increase both its technology and capital investment in China, as well as Huawei's ability to fully meet customers' demands for 3G mobile telecommunications solutions.

The agreement marks the beginning of a long-term partnership between China's leading communications equipment vendor and the world's leading semiconductor provider.

Huawei designs and develops a wide range of telecommunications products and is ideally placed to drive the construction of telecom infrastructure in China.

Huawei selected Philips Semiconductors as its provider of 3G core ASIC chipsets because of its expertise and production capabilities in the design and development of cellular system and network chips.

Philips Semiconductors can provide technical support and manufacturing services through more than 20 ASIC technical centres and many semiconductor test and assembly facilities and production lines all over the world.

"This agreement reaffirms our market leadership in the development and manufacturing of communication chips", said Peter Baumgartner, senior vice president and general manager, Global Market Segment Communications at Philips Semiconductors.

"Under this agreement we will be working closely with Huawei to develop the 3G ASIC chipset to enable Huawei to increase its competitiveness in both local and international markets".

Ye Qing, vice president, ASIC business at Huawei, said: "After several years' hard work, Huawei has developed many switch, access, and transmission ASIC chips, which give real benefit to the systems market.

By co-operating with Philips Semiconductors, Huawei can now deliver more rapidly and efficiently a more competitive commercial 3G system based on advanced chip development technology".

Under the terms of this agreement, Philips Semiconductors will provide the core ASIC chipset based on its CMOS technology for 3G applications.

In addition to reducing costs and improving performance, the resulting new chipset will speed up product development time and time-to-market.

The two companies are discussing the feasibility of expanding the co-operation through codeveloping other chips with ASIC technology, such as DSP subsystems and private IP modules as well as system-on-chip solutions.

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