US : A teardown analysis of a Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) wireless card for mobile PCs conducted by market research analyst iSuppli Corp. concluded that the device is is part of a wave of first-generation offerings intended to pave the way for future mass-market products that have more streamlined and cost-reduced designs, iSuppli said.

iSuppli said its teardown analysis service conducted a dissection of the Huawei E620, a PCMCIA card that works with 2G tri-band GSM and 3.5G HSDPA. The E620 provides a relatively seamless wireless high-speed Internet connection for mobile PCs that have PCMCIA slots, according to iSuppli.

The E620 carries a materials and manufacturing cost of $79, according to iSuppli's teardown analysis. In comparison, the average materials and manufacturing cost is only about $12 for PCMCIA wireless LAN cards that offer higher downlink speeds, but with much less range and coverage than HSDPA delivers, the firm concluded. The cost of HSPDA cards can be subsidized by wireless service providers, which could reduce the difference in cost between HSPDA cards and wireless LAN cards seen by customers, iSuppli said.

"Designs for HSDPA wireless cards need to pursue additional cost reductions to help the standard realize its full market potential as a mainstream technology for high-speed wireless data communications," said Andrew Rassweiler, an iSuppli senior analyst who manages the firm's teardown services.

iSuppli said the E620 incorporates the same major chips that its teardown team has found in many previously dissected mobile phones. The core chips in the E620 are almost entirely the same as those in the Samsung SGH-Z520 mobile phone, the firm said. The device uses a standard Qualcomm Inc. chipset, including the DBB, an RF transceiver, an RF receiver and a power-management integrated circuit, iSuppli said.

The $79 cost for the E620 consists of $6 in production expenses and $73 for materials, iSuppli said. Major cost drivers in the E620 include the Qualcomm MSM6275, a digital baseband processor that integrates support for Quad-Band GSM/GPRS, GPS, UMTS, HSDPA and Bluetooth wireless communications, according to the firm. The MSM6275 has an estimated cost of $29.50, representing 40.4 percent of the E620's total materials expense, iSuppli said.

Other major cost drivers include Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.'s K5D1257DCM-D090, a memory multichip package that integrates 512 megabits of NAND flash and 256 megabits of SDRAM, iSuppli said.

The E620's cost and design are adequate to serve its purpose as an early product designed to seed the market for HSDPA, iSuppli said. But significant cost reductions will have to be achieved before HSDPA is optimally positioned to penetrate the wider mass market, according to iSuppli.

The E620 has a relatively high component account, offering opportunity to migrate to a more streamlined design in the future, iSuppli said. The firm expects second-generation HSDPA cards and mobile phones to be less costly to build-and less expensive for consumers to buy.

HSDPA supports data transmission rates of up to 14.4 megabits per second over a 5 megahertz bandwidth in the downlink direction, while High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) further enhances HSDPA with data rates of up to 5.6 megabits per second in the uplink direction, iSuppli said.

Most of the early implementations of HSDPA have been in the form of wireless data communications cards, according to iSuppli. As of July, there were 25 such cards on the market, including the Huawei E620, the firm said.

But the greatest market potential for HSDPA over the long term resides in new 3.5G mobile phones that support fast data access speeds, as well as voice communication, according to iSuppli. In July, 19 HSDPA 3.5G mobile phones were on the market, some of which have similar designs and components to the E620, the firm said.

HSDPA and HSUPA are considered the leading candidates to be the mainstream standard for 3.5G mobile-phone systems. Shipments of HSDPA and HSUPA devices are expected to rise to 87.1 million units by 2010, up from a mere 917,000 in 2006, according to iSuppli. This does not include laptops with embedded HDSPA or HSUPA chipsets, the firm added.

The Huawei E620 is being offered by Vodafone in the United Kingdom for a price of 116 pounds, or about $272, with a minimum one-year contract, according to iSuppli. Due to this relatively high price and the expense for HSDPA network usage time, the target market for the card is limited to business users who require data communications in the field, according to iSuppli.

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