To date, 3G phones have been prohibitive for many reasons. Poor battery life, large and cumbersome size factors, as well as excessive costs to manufacturers have been but a few of the leading deterrents for mass adoption of 3G technologies, according to Brian Modoff, senior analyst and managing director at Deutsche Bank Securities.
Nevertheless, Modoff is still predicting that the 3G handset market will continue to expand, reaching 680 million WCDMA units by 2010.
Sequoia's new chip, the SEQ7400, is officially the first seven-band, HEDGE (HSDPA/WCDMA and EDGE/GPRS/GSM) RF transceiver that uses the company's patented new architecture, according to Dave Shepard, president and CEO of Sequoia. It promises to improve battery life, as well as reduce the footprint and overall manufacturing costs associated with 3G handsets.
The strategy that Sequoia has with HEDGE has been in place since the middle of 2004, as Shepard explained.
"We sampled the first product in the middle of '05, and got our partnerships in place," he said. "In the RF world, basically you have to line up baseband partners first. Then they tell you what else to do to the product, and then you get into a phone. " It's a little bit of a long road."
But Shepard says that Sequoia is now near the end of that road with its new RF transceiver, which is fully production ready and customized for the baseband partnerships.
Handset makers such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, and LG are all expected to use the new seven-band chip in certain models here in the U.S. and abroad.
And even though Sequoia is a bit down the food chain from the actual phone makers, Motorola and Nokia are both two of its major investors. So it stands to reason the both companies will be taking advantage of the new technology at one point or another.
"The bottom line is that 3G is a big market," Shepard said. "And it's getting bigger."
"3G phones are stilljust in terms of material cost to the phone makerabout twice as much as a 2G phone, and [you get] about half the talk time and battery life. In terms of the consumer, if the goal is to get 3G phones into everybody's hands, [they're] are still way too expensive and the battery life is terrible."
Things have been getting worse instead of better, too, according to Shepard. With the advent of smaller form factor phones like the RAZR, the trend is now to cram more and more features into a smaller and smaller package.
"[We want] more frequency bands, more features. We all want a Bluetooth headset, we all want GPS for location. It goes on and on," Shepard said.
"We're basically packing more into a smaller form factor, so it's a cost issue. But it's actually also a power issue. The Samsung Blackjack, for instance, ships with two batteries which is scary."
And that's one of the reasons Shepard says he came to Sequoia in the first place: to actually hit both of those problems with one product.
"It isn't just better integration," Shepard said of the new chip, it's actually a much lower power solution than anything out there."
When asked how much power savings a typical customer would see with the new RF transceiver, Shepard estimated on average about 40-50 percent in terms of both power and cost.
Among other things, the SEQ7400 boasts a multi-mode transmitter so there's also a single path for all modes, according to Shepard. "GSM, CDMA, EDGE, everything is all in one path, so it's kind of intuitive that you would say, 'that's a more efficient architecture.' It's less circuitry, less power, less size."
Shepard added that Sequoia's competition has to put multiple radios on a chip. Size and power is all inefficient if you have to do it that way, he said.
Additionally, the new transceiver will also be what Shepard describes as "future proof."
"As we go to WiMax and 4G and we all want Wi-Fi, it's just going to continue to get worse. Our architecture allows you put all of those on in the exact same efficient architecture "
"We can do all those modes with the exact same path. So when 4G comes along, we'll use the same architecture."