Sequans enters agreement with Fujitsu Semiconductor

PARIS, FRANCE: Sequans Communications S.A. has established a technology and marketing collaboration with Fujitsu Semiconductor Ltd for the purpose of providing customers with a comprehensive, high-performance LTE product offering that combines Fujitsu Semiconductor’s multimode 2G/3G/LTE RF solution with Sequans’ just-announced, next generation LTE baseband solutions.

The Fujitsu Semiconductor RF transceiver supports all major global bands and modes, including LTE bands, and will be pre-integrated and fully validated with Sequans’ LTE chips by Sequans.

“Our collaboration with Fujitsu Semiconductor ensures that our customers can adopt our LTE baseband solution to build devices for virtually any LTE spectrum band around the world,” said Georges Karam, Sequans’ CEO. “Furthermore, our mutual customers will benefit from this global multi-mode, multi-band solution in terms of cost efficiency and shorter time to market due to the pre-integration and validation work Sequans has completed on the combined solution.”

The Sequans/Fujitsu Semiconductor combined solution features Fujitsu Semiconductor’s MB86L12A 2G/3G/LTE RF CMOS transceiver and Sequans’ SQN3110 and SQN3120 baseband chips. The MB86L12A supports all 3GPP LTE-FDD and LTE-TDD bands. The SQN3110 is Sequans’ new generation 40 nm LTE baseband chip that is 3GPP R9 compliant, supporting category 4 throughput and providing extremely low power consumption in a very small footprint for handsets and the smallest of mobile devices. The SQN3120 adds an integrated applications processor for portable hotspots, hostless USB modems, and CPE devices.

“The Fujitsu Semiconductor MB86L12A features industry-leading RF LSI, and when coupled with the new LTE baseband from Sequans, will provide device manufacturers with a competitive LTE platform,” said Vivek Bhan, executive VP, Fujitsu Semiconductor Wireless Products. “Fujitsu Semiconductor is a leader in multi-mode, multi-band RF transceivers that reduce total radio BOM costs and customer’s time to market for bringing versatile, worldwide roaming device solutions.”

The Sequans/Fujitsu Semiconductor Wireless Products Inc. technical collaboration will focus on ensuring that the combined platform solution is optimized and is fully verified, and that customers can quickly move through the design and prototyping stage into production. Each company will maintain separate responsibility for price, availability and support of its respective products included in the combined platform.

“Sequans and Fujitsu Semiconductor have worked closely to create a world-class solution that delivers not only global multi-mode, multi-band compatibility, but also high performance, low power consumption, and excellent cost-efficiency,” said Karam. “Our partnership with Fujitsu delivers true value to manufacturers for a wide range of LTE-enabled devices, including smartphones, tablets, mobile hotspots, embedded modules, and more.”

Reference designs for multiple device types based on the combined Sequans/Fujitsu Semiconductor LTE solution are expected to be available from Sequans beginning later this year.