EETimes reports that China telecom giant Huawei Technologies is producing its own HSPA baseband silicon, according to a new teardown report by ABI Research. The discovery of the chip raises questions about how far Huawei’s ambitions extend in basebands at a time when LTE networks are o the rise.
Huawei makes two wideband CDMA external modems, both sold as the E173. One version uses a Qualcomm MSM6290 HSPA chipset, the other uses a baseband designed by Huawei’s HiSilicon division and both are subjects of ABI teardown reports. Since the modem’s release in late 2010, the Huawei HSPA baseband has appeared in two other products, ABI said.
With this, it simply shows that Chinese legacy players are stepping this game up and very soon, they will become independent from many US vendors in chip supplies. They are developing competence and capacity in multiple areas and will surely improve with time.
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What is HSPA?
High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) is an amalgamation of two mobile telephony protocols, High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA), that extends and improves the performance of existing WCDMA protocols. A further 3GPP standard, Evolved HSPA (also known as HSPA+), was released late in 2008 with subsequent adoption worldwide beginning in 2010. (wikipedia)