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System LSIs for 3G Mobile Terminals Partnership

23rd November , 2004

ASIA : NEC Corporation and NEC Electronics announced that they had entered into a close collaboration to jointly develop a system LSI for 3G mobile terminals, in line with NEC's strategy to strengthen the competitiveness of its 3G mobile terminal platforms for the global market. NEC formed a strong partnership with NEC Electronics, the leader in single-mode (W-CDMA) 3G baseband LSIs in Japan, and the two companies will jointly develop a dual-mode (W-CDMA and GSM/GPRS/EDGE) 3G baseband LSI which will be the core of 3G mobile terminals.

NEC and NEC Electronics formed a joint project team and commenced development recently to realize a globally competitive LSI. NEC's mobile terminals business unit will be responsible for defining basic LSI specifications and verifying the LSI to be embedded in the mobile terminals. NEC Electronics will be responsible for the LSI design, development and production. The first mobile terminal which employs the LSI will be introduced to the market between October 2006 and March 2007.

Through this collaboration, NEC Electronics, which currently holds the number one market share in Japan for single-mode 3G platforms, aims to extend its expertise to dual-mode 3G platforms for the global market. NEC has been involved in 3G research and development for a long time, accumulating leading 3G technologies and know-how, realizing world's first commercial W-CDMA mobile handset, and contributing to 3G standardization activities. By leveraging the two companies' extensive technological
competence in 3G terminals, communication and electron devices, NEC can quickly realize highly advanced mobile terminals that use 3G technologies such as HSDPA.

In addition, NEC is also strengthening its development effort in Linux platform for mobile terminals, enabling effective and horizontal utilization of software development resources inside and outside company, helping to decrease development time, and supporting new mobile applications and services.

NEC's Linux platform for mobile terminals will employ the jointly developed baseband LSI. With the effective combination with NEC Electronics' MP211 application processor, advanced and high performance mobile terminals applications such as terrestrial digital TV combination, various multimedia applications and voice recognition can be realized. Both companies will also strive to realize smaller, more compact mobile terminals by decreasing the size of the LSI and by creating an architecture to enable combination of the baseband LSI and application processor into a single chip.

NEC Electronics will also sell the jointly developed LSI to other mobile phone manufacturers as well, and aims to be a market leader in this area.

Major features of the LSI are as follows.
- Compliant with 3GPP release 5 (as of September 2003)
- Supports HSDPA (external accelerator)
- Supports GSM/GPRS/EDGE and W-CDMA modes
- Manufactured using leading edge 90nm process technology

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