英飞凌WLS收购新创LTE公司 英特尔齐收囊中

Intel to acquire Dresden LTE firm

Peter Clarke

Infineon's wireless business unit, which is in the process of being acquired by Intel Corp., is taking over Blue Wonder Communications GmbH, a specialist in LTE communications.

Blue Wonder (Dresden, Germany) was founded in 2008 and provides LTE intellectual property. The company concluded a funding round in 2009, and the 50-person company claims to have orders for its technology.

Infineon's wireless business unit has been working with Blue Wonder for about 18 months on the development of baseband technologies for the Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile standard, Infineon said. "Blue Wonder's special LTE know-how complements the long-standing LTE development activities of WLS. Infineon WLS will take over all the employees of Blue Wonder Communications. Both parties have agreed not to disclose the price or further details of the transaction," said a spokesman for Infineon. Meanwhile Intel is acquiring Infineon's wireless business for $1.4 billion in cash with the deal expected to close in the first quarter of 2011.

"In effect Intel bulks up more in LTE cellular," said Will Strauss, president and principal analyst with Forward Concepts (Tempe Arizona). Strauss added that Blue Wonder has been creating its solutions by using multiple Tensilica DSP cores along with 4G software stacks from 4M Wireless Ltd. (Luton, England) and SySDSoft Inc. (Cairo, Egypt).

The 4G mobile standard LTE is the successor to 3G/HSPA and provides for a 150-Mbit's downlink and 50-Mbit/s uplink.

Blue Wonder Communications joined the EE Times' Silicon 60 in version 9.0 in October 2009.