Comlent Develops Chinas First Complete RFIC Transceiver for PHS-PAS Handsets

Comlent, a fabless RFIC design house headquartered in Shanghai, China announced today that it has successfully developed a whole radio-frequency integrated circuit (RFIC) transceiver and power amplifier (PA) chip set for PHS/PAS handsets. The chip and board level evaluations show excellent performance and outstanding sound quality for the handset. Comlent has provided samples to its potential customers for their new handset designs. This is the first complete RFIC transceiver, one of the most difficult ICs to design, being sampled by a Chinese company to date.

A handset based on Comlent’s PHS/PAS transceiver (CL3110) and PA (CL3503) meets or exceeds PHS international standard STD-28 across the board. The sensitivity of the transceiver, an important parameter measuring the capability of covering range for a base station, leads all existing products. The CL3110 significantly lowers the build of material (BoM) cost of both the RF module and the entire handset due to its high level of integration. The RF transceiver integrates the VCO and fractional-N PLL on chip as well as eliminates the costly surface acoustic wave (SAW) filter required by most existing transceiver solutions today. This leading edge result is achieved by using a new low-IF (10.8MHz) architecture enabled by Comlent’s proprietary intellectual property (IP) and design. Other existing RFIC transceivers on the market use older “super-heterodyne” architectures that require expensive SAW filters on board.

China currently has nearly 70 million PHS/PAS subscribers, and experienced an annual growth of 25 to 30 million handsets per year in 2003 and 2004. New market drivers such as the physical separation between the phone number card and handset as well as the enablement of short messaging between PHS/PAS and GSM/CDMA mobile handsets will augment the growth of the handset market. Comlent’s investors include leading venture capital investors such as Intel Capital, 3i and Draper Fisher Jurvetson as well as top executives of leading semiconductor companies.

“In the past two and a half years, Comlent has invested millions of US dollars in R&D to develop proprietary and patented IP for RFIC transceiver and PA designs in both CMOS and BiCMOS technologies. This production ready PHS transceiver for high frequency (1.9GHz) is developed based on Jazz Semiconductor’s leading RFIC process,” says co-founder and CEO of Comlent, Dr. Kai Chen. “Comlent’s business vision and mission are to provide the most sophisticated RFIC technology, strongest support and quality service to local vendors. This latest milestone is another example of our full commitment to our customers to win in the domestic or global marketplace.”

“Jazz Semiconductor is pleased to expand its customer base in China by working with companies such as Comlent to enable the design of RFICs for the Chinese mobile market,” stated Paul Kempf, chief technology and marketing officer at Jazz Semiconductor. “Comlent’s use of Jazz RF process technologies for a complex RFIC targeted at this market further reinforces our confidence and commitment to Asian and Chinese markets”.