Freescale sold off their Tempe, AZ transceiver design team and IP to Fujitsu in April 2009, but the companies kept this relatively quiet until recently.
On September 15 '09, Fujitsu announced the MB86L01A, a world-class quad-EDGE quad-WCDMA transceiver from Freescale's Tempe design team. This transceiver has most of the features that Sequoia (now defunct) and SiRiFIC (acquired by Icera) claimed for their leading-edge transceivers: multi-band, internally reconfigurable, eliminates 3G SAW filters, can operate with dual-mode PAs, works in open or closed loop PA control modes, accepts simple commands from the baseband to change modes and bands, DigRF interface.
This is a winning product, at least on paper. We expect Fujitsu to initially get attention from Motorola, RIM, and OEMs in Japan with the transceiver, the success of which would quickly help establish Fujitsu as a viable chipset vendor beyond the domestic Japanese market.
Chris Taylor
Client reading:
Handset Transceivers: Still Crucial to Positioning & Survival of Chipset Leaders