¡°There is a lot of activity these days in VoIP¡±

EDN Asia spoke with Infineon Technologies, North America, Vice President of Communication Business Group, Jean-Baptiste Loire, on his views on the communications market. Excerpts.

Currently, there is not enough high-speed broadband penetration for VoIP to come mainstream. Please comment.

VoIP is still a competitive technology, and like any new market, this is going to expand. You have traditional operators who look at their income and revenue and see their profits decline because their business model has to be changed, then you have the newcomers who seem to do well. It¡¯s been said that Google wants to launch its own VoIP system. So there is a lot of activity these days in VoIP and Infineon has the products in our portfolio to support this competitive technology.

TI recently announced that it has come up with an ultra low cost handset solution that reduces BOM by 30 percent. How does Infineon position itsown ultra low cost handset solution in this regard?

When you talk about ultra low cost, there is no other differentiation point because price itself is the differentiator. We announced that the component count on our handset module is under 100. So $20 for a phone is what we think is a good price point to penetrate this ultra low cost market. One of the things that is also going to make a difference is the capabilities of the Flash card that will be included in feature sets, and how to integrate this into your product offering. The good news about Infineon is that we do have the offering for this ultra low cost platform.

How do you see the battle for dominance between GSM and CDMA in digital wireless telephone systems?

This is related more to the capabilities of phones. We talk about triband phones in the past and moving forward, wideband CDMA, UMTS is going to make sure everybody is connected wherever they go in the world. Again, like in the DSL world, it is the change of technologies in that generation so you need to deploy the relevant technologies. The UMTS licenses are pretty expensive still. As soon as the cost of these licenses drop and people start to deploy the base stations, the price of licences is going to increase again. I guess this is going to be a competing technology in the future.

Where do you see ultra wide band and 802.11n standard going?

Apparently, Bluetooth has limitations in terms of bottlenecks on bandwidth. There are some differentiating factors between 802.11n and ultra wide band in terms of distance. I think all of them will find their scope of application. Ultra wide band has yet to be proven because till now there is no real application with this technology. 802.11n is also getting the momentum right now because after 802.11a/b/g, the natural move will be to 802.11n. Again, the compromise is between speed and ease-ofuse.

So it is how much bandwidth you get and how easy it is to deploy the technology. But I believe it is a matter of time that these things will converge because for semiconductor suppliers, each time they need to develop a chipset, each time they need to put the support in place, each time they need to integrate, it is very demanding. Ultimately, if all those things could converge into one technology that would be great.

Do you think Wi-MAX will soon become the de-facto standard in wireless technology?

We have been observing Wi-MAX for a long period of time. Intel is pushing the technology because this is what people would qualify as DSL for wide territories. So you can access at the speed of DSL anywhere in the world without connecting to a Wi- Fi base station. Again, this is a question of standards. Will the infrastructure be deployed easily enough so that the standard will take off at that speed? It is not clear to us right now because there is a lot of competing technologies that claim to provide the same capabilities as Wi-MAX. When you go into the network right now, you can connect to Wi-Fi anywhere and they are not even obliged to have a service provider.

Is Wi-MAX going to be the new technology? We are not sure. Do we want to invest in Wi-MAX or wait a little longer? We have not made this decision yet.