Aug 30, 2007 4:44 PM, By Donny Jackson

CMOS transceivers chips using Terocelo’s patented True Software Radio (TRS) technology will be commercially available in about a year, when they can be integrated into mobile handset devices, a company official told MRT yesterday.

Known as TechnoConcepts until changing its name in June, Terocelo currently provides silicon germanium transceiver chips that enable communications with commercial protocols operating in spectrum from 800 MHz to 6 GHz, said Alan Varghese, Terocelo’s director of marketing. These chipset are most often used in infrastructure equipment like Femto/Pico Cell gear and other “market segments where power consumption is not the most critical issue and software upgradabilty and flexibility is,” he said.

To address the power-consumption-sensitive mobile device market, Terocelo is developing a CMOS chipset that will address commercial concerns regarding device battery life, Varghese said. A test chip should be ready this winter, and plans call for the CMOS transceiver to be commercially available during the summer or fall of 2008, he said.

This rollout should time nicely with the need for devices with greater spectral flexibility as operators plan and deploy networks operating in the AWS and 700 MHz bands, Varghese said. Continuing the current multiband-radio technique of including complete RF components for each band is not practical in the next generation of wireless, he said.

“Today, you can find advanced 2G handsets that are triple band—maybe even quad band—and there are 3G handsets that get up to triple band,” Varghese said. “But the issue is, how do you do 3G handsets with quad band, going to five bands with 1700 MHz and six bands with 700 MHz, the frequencies that have recently opened up?

“That’s where the traditional model starts to break. You can’t keep on slapping baseband RF combinations inside the constrained space of a handset.”

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