LONDON — At present STMicroelectronics and NXP, the expectant parents of an as yet unborn and unnamed wireless joint venture, compete in the provision of chips to mobile handset makers. Frans van Houten, president and CEO of Dutch chip company NXP BV (Eindhoven, The Netherlands), discussed with EE Times the complementary nature of the two companies' wireless product offerings.
Firstly van Houten pointed out that NXP has agreed to contribute three-quarters of its wireless business unit with strength in cellular baseband, in RF, in single-chip low-cost phones for 2G, and in chipsets for the TD-SCDMA standard, originally developed at Siemens in the 1990s and now adopted by China.
NXP has also gone on to focus on the software protocol discussions centering on long-term evolution (LTE) the expected extention to 3G standards, van Houten said.
At the same time NXP has a good position in low-power, short-range connectivity such as USB, Bluetooth, UWB and near-field communications (NFC). This "connectivity" is an essential part of the latest phones. And the claims that van Houten made for NXP's wireless business unit did not end there. It also has GPS capabilities, topped up through the recent acquisition of GloNav Inc. (see Feb. 4 story).
And through its broadcast television heritage and Nexperia platform design style NXP is also good at multimedia, van Houten said, although ST, with a lot of experience acquired providing chips for set-top boxes and in the form of its Nomadik processor also claims a world-class position there.
The area that NXP is keeping back is its expertise in speaker activities, such as Class-D amplifiers and chips for mobile infrastructure such as power amplifiers for mobile phone basestations.
Both NXP and ST have wireless divisions of a similar size with an operational profit of $100 million on annual sales revenue of about $1.5 billion in 2007. But nonetheless van Houten seemed to have described the complete spectrum of mobile phone activity from ultra-low cost phones to LTE.
So where does that leave ST to be complementary?
