Atheros debuts its first cellular chipset

Wireless semiconductor systems developer Atheros Communications made its first move into the cellular market this week, repurposing its fundamental radio technology to create the Atheros AR9100, a single-chip solution implementing a complete cellular transceiver, baseband, application processor, audio paths, power management and keypad, display and USB interfaces.

The AR1900 encompasses the functions required to run personal handy phone (PHS) devices, which represent a low-cost alternative to GSM and CDMA handsets for subscribers in Asia, in particular the booming Chinese market. A digital TDMA-TDD technology delivering voice and data services across the 1.9 GHz spectrum band, PHS was first introduced in Japan; though soon superseded by the GSM standard, there are still 5 million Japanese PHS subscribers. And while GSM also captures about 73% of the Chinese market, PHS phones currently enjoy about 19% market penetration.

"For a company of our scale, this is a very attractive market--there are over 70 million subscribers worldwide, and many analysts are projecting that to grow to the 90 or 100 million range by the end of this year," said Atheros president and CEO Craig Barratt.

According to Barratt, the AR9100's single-chip design will reduce the cost of PHS handsets by 30% compared to multiple chip solutions. "One of our hallmarks in Wi-Fi is very high levels of integration driving the cost down," Barratt said. "We think we can leapfrog the current silicon providers in terms of the degree of integration and the price point we can achieve."