Samsung Gearing Up For 4G Network

Samsung Electronics stepping forward to reduce the cost of next generation handsets, by making its own WiMax and LTE baseband chips.

Samsung is one of the largest handset manufacturers in the world, while currently using chips from the companies like Broadcom, Infineon, and Qualcomm. However, the company already had experience building its own application processors and wants to reduce the amount of patent royalties it has to pay.

The company use to depend upon Qualcomm chips because Qualcomm owns much of the intellectual property related to the 3G CDMA standard. But last year Samsung diversified its chipsets to companies like Broadcom and Infineon, reporting that they do not depend on Qualcomm patents.
Though, Samsung still rely on many Qualcomm chips for few more years, since it will take a will to switch to 4G networks. But earlier this year, Texas Instruments said it would sell off its wireless baseband division, which can make a room to operate in the mobile chips. Even, Freescale also said it would consider selling its wireless chip business.

"We are also trying to develop competitive multimedia chipsets to support various multimedia functions," Young Cho Chi, senior VP of strategic planning for Samsung, told EE Times.

Samsung said that they are not sure yet that on which technology they will rely on between WiMax and LTE, because on papers LTE is providing 100 Mbps download speed. But the point is that the technology is still being established, and not expected to be widely deployed until 2010 at the earliest.

But companies like Comcast, Intel, Google, Sprint, Time Warner, and others are backing WiMax. Altho, WiMax potentially has slower maximum download speed, it's already live in Baltimore and is expanding to other markets.