US : Sequoia Communications announced the release of SEQ7400, the industry’s first single-chip, polar transmit, seven-band, HEDGE (HSDPA/WCDMA and EDGE/GPRS/GSM) RF transceiver based on their patented FullSpectra™ architecture.
The SEQ7400 has the industry’s highest level of integration, lowest power consumption and the lightest phone level calibration burden. These innovations improve the battery life and reduce the footprint and the overall manufacturing costs of 3G handsets.
According to Brian Modoff, senior analyst and managing director at Deutsche Bank Securities, battery life, size and cost are primary obstacles to mass adoption of 3G technologies by consumers. “We estimate that the 3G handset market will reach 680 million WCDMA units in 2010, with HSPA accounting for 310 million of those units, and improvements in battery life, form factor and cost are critical to enabling this growth,” said Modoff. “The Sequoia Communications SEQ7400 is taking the next step in increasing the level of integration and reducing the cost of ownership for HEDGE transceivers.”
The Polar Advantage
The SEQ7400 is the second product in Sequoia Communications’ transceiver line, adding tri-band WCDMA/HSDPA capability and fully autonomous calibration. The company’s multi-mode transceiver line delivers a fundamental breakthrough in RF IC technology with a common basic architecture shared across all modes.
Polar modulation, the de facto standard transmit architecture in GSM/EDGE mobile devices, had never been successfully implemented for WCDMA until Sequoia Communications released its first product, the SEQ5400. With the SEQ7400, Sequoia Communications remains the only company demonstrating working polar modulation in WCDMA/HSDPA. This breakthrough has enabled Sequoia Communications to achieve best-in-class silicon efficiency and has established a clear path to large signal PA modulation in future products. Moreover, this architecture will enable a cost- and power-efficient means to integrate higher bandwidth standards, such as UTAN LTE, WiMAX and WiBro, in subsequent products.
Industry’s Highest Level of Integration
With its innovative architecture, the SEQ7400 significantly reduces the complexity of multi-mode, multi-band mobile devices, which provides suppliers with a flexible solution that can be implemented across multiple tiers of mobile devices. The product supports WCDMA, HSDPA, EDGE, GPRS, GSM modes across seven frequency bands simultaneously, making it applicable to major networks worldwide. The integrated receiver includes all LNAs and, unique to the SEQ7400, also eliminates the need for external WCDMA SAW filters. In addition, the low noise polar modulation transmit architecture eliminates the transmit SAW filters for GSM/EDGE.
The SEQ7400 is the only transceiver in the industry to eliminate external WCDMA Rx filters. This breakthrough enabled the efficient integration of all WCDMA LNAs without the need to go off chip and back on chip to use costly and bulky SAW filters. The integration of LNAs and filters significantly reduces the RF bill of materials (BOM) and board layout complexity creating a new benchmark in size and cost for all mobile devices using this product.
“Lowering the overall cost of ownership and reducing the size of mobile handsets is critical for the broad adoption of 3G technologies,” said David Shepard, CEO of Sequoia Communications. “The SEQ7400 is based on our patented approach to polar modulation and is the smallest, lowest cost multi-mode HEDGE transceiver solution in the industry. The release of the SEQ7400 will greatly benefit wireless handset manufacturers in their ability to deliver small, low-cost 3G handsets to consumers.”
Ease of Use
Complex calibrations and cumbersome programming interfaces have long plagued the RF transceiver market, making these devices difficult to integrate into a phone. Polar architectures have traditionally suffered from issues with calibrations. To address this, Sequoia Communications designed significant intelligence into the SEQ7400, making it a virtually self-calibrating device with a very simple programming interface. There is no burden placed on the baseband device or at the phone level. This will significantly reduce the factory calibration time for handset manufacturers, leading to much lower manufacturing cost and higher throughput.
The SEQ7400 is in an 8mm x 8mm BGA package. Samples and complete RF evaluation boards are available now. Volume production is anticipated in the second half of 2007.
