Industry Players Should Step Up and Provide TD-SCDMA Solutions to Have a Portion of the China 3G Market

( 1 Nov 2007 )

By Stephen Las Marias, Editor


Brian de Bart, Product Marketing Manager, BL Cellular Systems, NXP Semiconductors, discussed with Wireless Design and Development Asia the current atmosphere in China's 3G technology development, in particular its homegrown TD-SCDMA technology. He also provided details on the company's initiatives targeted at this market. Excerpts:

What can you say about China's TD-SCDMA market situation?
If you look at the history of TD-SCDMA you will see that it started about five years ago. At that time NXP Semiconductors was still known as Philips Semiconductors. Our first venture into this began with Datang Mobile, who had a project with Siemens to develop the standard necessary for TDSCDMA. NXP was involved in making the chipsets for the handsets, but most international companies were initially skeptical that TD-SCDMA would ever really take off. We've seen a similar thing happen before of course; China had various initiatives that they tried to carry out, but in the end they were not commercially viable. With TD-SCDMA, the story was different. Most international companies—both on the handset side and the infrastructure side—have realized that this standard has established itself, and that they have to do something with it if they want to get a portion of the China 3G market.

TD-SCDMA has moved from a research project into a real industry chain. Today, there are several chipset vendors and handset makers developing phones—in fact there are about 20 different handset makers developing TD-SCDMA test phones. On the infrastructure side, there are three major vendors—Datang, ZTE and TD TECH. Finally, the test and measurement equipment side of the business, which was traditionally a weak point in the industry chain—is now emerging.

What about the licensing issues?
Apart from handsets and infrastructure, what you also need for it to be a commercial success is an operator. There is still no official 3G license in China, and no operator is allowed to run a commercial 3G network. For a long time we have been waiting for a sign from the government regarding the choice of operators. However, even though there are no formal licenses as of today, I think all the signs point to China Mobile as the designated TD-SCDMA operator. China Mobile is the biggest worldwide TDM operator, so I think it is quite natural for China Mobile to become a TDSCDMA operator. If that happens we may see them grow to become one of the biggest 3G operators in the world within four or five years. If they are using TD-SCDMA, it will be a very important boost for the technology's popularity.

In the TD-SCDMA value chain, handset development still lags behind that of equipment systems. What do you think are the main problems regarding this issue?
This is actually very normal. It happened this way with GSM, and it happened with WCDMA. It's natural for the infrastructure to be ahead of the handsets. The reason stems from the fact that when you make the chipsets or handsets you need to run interoperability tests that require infrastructure labs to test them. You cannot certify a handset until the infrastructure is already in place. Therefore it's not a surprise that the handset appears to lag behind in development. Another factor which plays a role in this is that there are only a few international handset makers active earlier in the process.

What do you think will be the next important issue to tackle?
The Chinese government is looking at the overall industry. They want to see the infrastructure side developed; they want to see enough handsets; they want to make sure that there are more solutions out there that can meet the requirements; and they are thinking about how to restructure the industry. Meanwhile, one hurdle may come with commercialization; especially for companies such as Motorola and Samsung. They have very high quality standards, so the time taken to go from the first demo to a stable production ready phone for mass production may be considerable.

We have to move from the first demo in March to commercial handsets in October or November— that is not only a technological hurdle but this is an issue that the entire TD-SCDMA industry will have to deal with. As I've said before, the infrastructure that is rolled out in the various cities will need to be stable. As we start field trials, we will probably find new issues in the infrastructure while at the same time trying to commercialize the handsets. I think this is going to be the big challenge in the coming months; to stabilize the infrastructure and to stabilize the services and handsets all at the same time. Looking at the future, the data rate has to go up, so we are looking at HSDPA as an option. Over the coming months we will have an HSDPA chip that we will start testing. We have to work on two sides: to turn our current solution into a commercial product while also developing our next generation product.

Can you describe your current solution for the TDSCDMA technology?
Based on the NXP Nexperia Cellular System solutions 7210, the T3G 7208 enabled the first TDSCDMA/ GSM automatic handover. The T3G 7208 supports TDD-LCR Release 4 and has a data rate of 384kbps for downlink and 128kbps uplink. It is a dual mode—with EDGE—and that means even on the 2G network users can have some internet browsing experience. We have integrated all the multimedia such as accelerators for video telephony and for video streaming that are needed for 3G applications. We removed the WCDMA portion and replaced it with T3G's TD-SCDMA solution. This is the solution that we offer today and we are now developing it further with our key customers. Our focus for 3G is actually a low-cost focus. We focus on the mass market 3G; we don't aim at the very high-end market. Our solution is cost optimized for the sweet spots of the mass market. We have made an effort to make the software compatible between different radio technologies so that investments from our customers can be reusable between different technologies.


You can reach Stephen Las Marias at stephen.lasmarias@rbi-asia.com.