Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Nokia new chipset partnerships

Nokia today announced thier new partnership with ST Microelectronics and with Broadcom for supply of 3G and Edge chipsets.This announcements has consequence not only for Nokia ,ST Micro and Broadcom but also for the entire Mobile phone industry.
Before going further a brief overview of status of todays mobilephone chipset industry would give good starting point to analyse the impact of todays anouncement.Today for Nokia ,Texas Instrument is the biggest and sole supplier of chipset for WCDMA and Edge technolgies in partcular and also biggest supplier of GSM chipset .Infact there are only 2 real big palyers in entire mobile chip industry namely Qualcomm and Texas instruments who are able to provide complete chipset solutions for entire range of mobile technologies (Qualcomm for CDMA families technologies including WCDMA and TI for GSM family of technolgies EDGE,WCDMA,HSDPA ).Complete chipset solution means both application processor and baseband processor .Application processor vendors spaces is crowded including STmicro ,Broadcomm and infineon but TI and qualcomm are only 2 big players who can provide complete solution .The entry barrier for producing complete solution has been baseband processor part which is not only complex technologies but the basic technologies patents have been held by Nokia ,Ericsson and Qualcomm .Out of the 3 Qualcomm are in the chipset business and prduce thier own complete chipset solution(inclding app processor) which mobile phone vendors like samsung,LG use .Nokia for instance so far has partnered with only TI to produce wcdma chipset that are used in thier handset .Becuase of the factors explained above Qualcomm and TI dominate the mobile phone processor industry .
Today's announcments shows that Nokia is willing to partner with others other than TI i.e with ST Microelectronics ,Broadcomm and Infineon that not only gives flexibility for Nokia but also create 3 more players ,who can provide complete chipset solution in market place for other handset vendors like samsung etc .This invaribly will drive the chipset cost down for the entire mobile industry and also put total pressure on Qualcomm and TI .Qualcomm in particular espcially inlight of ongoing legal battle between Qualcomm and Nokia over WCDMA patents.
Nokia also announced that they woud be licensings its WCDMA ,Edge technolgies to other chipset vendors as well so that they can provide complete chipset solutions .This will not only generate extra revenue for nokia but also sends a clear signal that Nokia no longer on a longer run sees HW chipset as business crtical control point .