Nokia will expand its use of commercially available chipsets,
adopt a multisourcing model, and discontinue some of its in-house silicon development efforts. Nokia said this new silicon strategy enables it to focus on its core competence in modem technology and invest in R&D areas besides radio technology, such as in software to power internet services.
Nokia will continue to develop its modem technology, which includes protocol software and related digital design for WCDMA/GSM and its evolution. Nokia will then license this modem technology to its chipset manufacturers, who will use it in the chipsets they develop and produce for Nokia and – if they so decide – in the chipsets they produce for the open market.
Nokia is now working with four chipset suppliers. Texas Instruments continues to be a broad scope supplier across all protocols, Broadcom has been chosen as a supplier in EDGE, Infineon Technologies as a supplier in GSM, and STMicroelectronics as a supplier in 3G.
Nokia and STMicroelectronics are negotiating a plan relating to transferring a part of Nokia’s Integrated Circuit (IC) operations to STMicroelectronics. The transfer is anticipated to concern approximately 200 Nokia employees in Finland and the UK, and it is estimated to take place during the fourth quarter 2007. Nokia has also awarded ST a design win of an advanced 3G HSPA chipset supporting high data rates, which would be the first contribution of the acquired IC design operations. This design win represents ST’s first win of a complete 3G chipset.
Nokia has selected Broadcom‘s advanced single-chip cellular baseband processor and its companion power management unit (PMU) for selected future EDGE mobile phones. Broadcom’s “Venus” single-chip EDGE multimedia processor uses 65 nanometer CMOS process technology and integrates an EDGE RF transceiver. http://www.nokia.com
