As head of a fabless semiconductor company focused on UWB as the foundation for Certified Wireless USB, I spend some of my time taking note of the wireless semiconductor landscape. This week I saw a very notable product announcement by Silicon Laboratories here in Austin, TX. Si Labs, as they are affectionately known in town, introduced the highly integrated Si4905. This chip integrates a quad band transceiver, baseband processor, ARM controller, power management, and other analog processing. It is intended to be a single chip GSM/GPRS phone aimed at the ultra-low-cost phone market. This product is especially notable along two dimensions. One is how it is likely to impact the wireless semiconductor market. The second is how it is likely to influence a future of “Life without wires”(tm) for millions of people in India and China.

This new part is a game-changing part. If it works as well as I anticipate it will, the chip will be the seminal product to point to some years from now in fundamental changes among who the top suppliers are to the cellular industry. It is likely that this part will drive sufficient revenue over the next few years to take Si Labs well north of $500M in annual revenue. More importantly, it puts Si Labs in direct competition with TI, Freescale, Agere and Infineon. What time has shown is that those companies who can drive volume from the low-end products often can move up the food chain over time. The Si4905 is likely to prove to be very popular with cell phone OEMs due to its integration, price point, performance and ease of design. This will allow Si Labs to ramp to significant volume in a relatively short time. Having established this beach head, they will then be able to go after mid-market EDGE phones as well.

The other dimension I find interesting about this new chip is how it is likely to impact the ultra-low-cost market. In particular, the barrier to cellular phone service in many parts of the world is the cost of the actual handset itself. The Si4905 is ideally suited to a $30 phone. This is low enough to allow large operators in China or India to put up towers in less wealthy provinces and be able to offer cellular phone service. Very importantly, this connectivity will improve the economies and the lives of those people who live in the areas where the service is introduced. The impact will be enormous and will enable a “Life without wires” for those who haven’t had access to such technologies in the past.

For a local view check out the Austin American Statesman. Here is the product spec. Another opinion.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 28th, 2005 at 6:48 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.