Icera attack on Qualcomm imminent

PLUCKY BRITISH chip specialist, Icera, is hoping to take on the mighty Qualcomm in the 3G data card sector. Nigel Toon, Icera co-founder, told the INQ that his company should be able to announce design wins within 30 days.

According to Toon, the market for data cards/USB dongles/mini cards in 2008 should double last year's sales taking it to some 25 to 30 million units. These units conform to the 3G/W-CDMA standard.

Currently the vast majority of these data cards from leading suppliers like Huawei, Sierra, Novatel and Option are based on Qualcomm chips.

Icera is quietly confident of breaking Qualcomm's stranglehold. Its only other real competitor is Ericsson which recently announced a deal to put 3G cards inside Dell laptops.

However, Toon says its own chipset is HSUPA-ready now. By contrast, Ericsson chipset is still on HSDPA. In layman's terms that means Icera's chipsets offer fast upload speeds as well as fast download speeds.

Toon pointed that the difference is important given that typical users of 3G dongles would like to sync their emails wirelessly which requires the faster speeds which HSUPA can offer.

To date there are few commercially announced HSUPA services but sources say that the big players like France Telecom/Orange and Vodafone are quietly rolling out such capabilities inside their 3G networks. It just a question of when they feel ready to make HSUPA publicly available.

Toon is quietly confident that once Icera chips start making their appearance inside 3G data cards and dongles, this will "waterfall" design wins down into the bigger market which is, of course, 3G capable smartphones. µ

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