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Apr. 22, 2009

As the wireless industry rapidly accelerates toward 4G technology and faces a similarly steep hill of interoperability problems as 3G had in the past, mobile handset manufacturers are taking a more cautious approach as they work hard in creating technological advances capable of problem-free roaming between three whole generations of mobile communications technologies, and as they prepare for 4G.

As many will recall, the mobile industry learned a painful lesson when it went from 2G to 3G technology, and it’s still trying to adjust for some past mistakes.

Instead of a move to high-profile handsets, the initial attention will be given on larger form factors. Verizon Wireless is following that trend before moving into higher-complexity, smaller form factor devices embedded in digital devices.

Of course, this is good news for the semiconductor industry, for whom the more gradual rollout of devices will provide a buffer before moving to more complex voice and data devices.

Generally speaking, it is easier to do data-only solutions than voice. Data is more tolerant of mistakes. It’s not like the call gets dropped. Overall, creating backwards compatible chips for LTE and Wi-MAX technology has its respective complexities.

In the past two to three years, handset manufacturers have had to solve a number of technical issues to integrate different technologies and different generations.

Steve Brown, head of product management for Qualcomm says "it’s rather difficult to integrate standards, but if you use some smart integration techniques, you can come up with pretty efficient solutions.”

He calls the challenge really tough, but says that integrating different generations and standards into a single chip designed for mobile service ultimately benefits manufacturers. It’s more than integration for integration’s sake. Integration increases economies of scale and streamlines manufacturing, ultimately lowering costs for manufacturers and wireless carriers.

Chips must also support a wide mix of frequency bands to seamlessly transition between 2G, 3G and 4G.

There’s also AWS at 1710-1755 MHz and 2110-2155 MHz; LTE at 746–757 MHz and 776–787 MHz; GSM at 890-915 MHz and 935-960 MHz, just to name a few.

If you want a mobile device to work with WiMAX technology, it will need to get up to Sprint’s 2.5 GHz spectrum, and that’s even before integrating Bluetooth and GPS.

One important detail with LTE-compatible devices is the required multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) antennas, which are more difficult to fit into a small form factor device like handsets. While it remains to be seen how well MIMO antennas work in extremely small form factor devices, handset manufacturers will certainly get some breathing room with larger form factors.

Although LTE and WiMAX technologies have their similarities, an abundance of complexities still exists when it comes to integrating them on a single device. That sort of integration would be necessary for phones capable of global roaming, as many countries are still going with WiMAX and others with LTE.

One of the key technical issues is around using a different digital modulation (OFDM as opposed to CDMA), which results in a need to use a completely different set of signal processing.

Nigel Wright, v.p. of product management for Spirent Communications says “it’s going to be interesting to see how many baseband chipset manufacturers can raise the capital required to move into 4G technology. It’s going to be a very investment-intensive challenge.”

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Source: Spirent Communications.