Variety keys wireless parley debuts

Electronic News, March 10, 1997

San Francisco--Lucent Technologies and Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) were among a throng of wireless companies here at the Wireless World '97 conference last week announcing business developments and introducing a variety of wireless chips including GSM baseband and wireless handset chipsets, various RF ICs and TDMA/CDMA chipsets.

Lucent Technologies said it has opened a wireless innovation lab for design, development and interoperability testing of wireless products and applications. The facility is located in Lisle, Ill. where the company already had a software and design facility. The new wireless lab is open now as an extension to that facility.

J.T. Wood, Lucent's manager of strategic marketing for Networking Wireless systems, said the company plans to embark on joint development with OEM customers including VoiceCue Technologies, Corsair Communications, Coral Systems, Centigram Communications, Telecommunications Systems (TCS) and Clover Systems.

"In the facility we may see products being jointly developed by Lucent and a third party or at the very least the products will be jointly tested by Lucent and another company," he said.

According to Mr. Wood, OEMs and third parties will bring their products to the wireless innovation lab and develop interoperable networks and end-user devices there. Other possibilities for the lab include joint marketing arrangements, distribution contracts, co-branding and co-development and cross licensing of hardware and software. Lucent said the lab will initially focus on applications addressing the problem of fraudulent network usage, which Lucent claims costs service providers more than $1 billion in lost revenue annually.

Meanwhile, ADI introduced three chipsets designed for the cellular base station and digital handset markets. The AD6600/AD6620 diversity receiver chipset and AD6640/AD6620 multichannel wideband receiver chipset are designed for narrowband cellular/PCS receivers and wideband radio base stations, respectively.

The AD6600/AD6620 diversity receiver chipset for GSM, CDMA, IS-136 standards combines a dual-channel IF sampling A/D converter and an dual-channel decimating receiver chip. The AD6640/AD6620 multichannel wideband receiver chipset combines a wideband A/D converter and decimating receiver chip.

A third chipset, the AD20msp400-HF, functions as an algorithm-specific mixed signal processor for mobile applications. The AD20msp400-HF combines a digital signal processor (DSP) with a single-chip audio codec for full-duplex conversation and noise suppression, ADI said. The three chipsets are planned for volume production sometime in 3Q97 with pricing beginning at $25 in 100-unit quantities.

Other Wireless World '97 highlights include:

* Finland-based Nokia announced that beginning this summer it will start using its own chipsets in the company's commercial CDMA dual-mode 800MHz cordless phone.

* Lucent Technologies dem-onstrated its algebraic code excited linear predictive (ACELP) algorithm technology enabling what the company claims is near-landline speech quality in IS-136 TDMA wireless networks.

* Nokia said that its TDMA IS-136 wireless phones would be equipped with the enhance full rate (EFR) GSM vocoder available in 3Q97. The EFR vocoder is said to deliver enhanced digital voice quality over that of half-rate GSM vocoder technology.

* RF amplifier vendor Spectrian introduced its CDMA multicarrier amplifier for PCS applications.