Chinese company develops complete RFIC transceiver

Comlent, a fabless RFIC design house, announced last week (Dec. 21) it is the first Chinese company to successfully develop a whole radio-frequency integrated circuit (RFIC) transceiver and power amplifier (PA) chipset for phs/PAS handsets.

Comlent (Shanghai) says the transceiver, designated the CL3110 and power amplifier (CL3503) meet or exceed PHS international standard STD-28 across the board in a handset design. The transceiver integrates the VCO and fractional-N PLL on chip and eliminates the costly surface acoustic wave (SAW) filter required by most existing transceiver solutions today.

"In the past two and a half years, Comlent has invested millions of US dollars in R&D to develop proprietary and patented IP for RFIC transceiver and PA designs in both CMOS and BiCMOS technologies," said Comlent's co-founder and chief executive Kai Chen.

China currently has nearly 70 million PHS/PAS subscribers, and experienced an annual growth of 25 to 30 million handsets per year in 2003 and 2004. New market drivers such as the physical separation between the phone number card and handset as well as the enabling of short messaging between PHS/PAS and GSM/CDMA mobile handsets are expected to augment the growth of the handset market.

- Spencer Chin

EE Times