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Polar modulation: the key to lower-power 3G phones, sooner than normal - Sequoia

The way all GSM phones work is with a radio technology called Polar Modulation. Until this week, nobody had cracked the trick of doing this for 3G phones, says semiconductor company Sequoia Communications - but at 3GSM, they were able to say: "We've done it."

The goal is to have a phone wireless all on one chip. We aren't quite there, but the Sequoia breakthrough claims that they've cut the typical component count in a multi-mode phone by around a third or more.

Multimode phones are the hardest to do; from the second half of this year, Sequoia reckons that all four-mode phones - that's GSM, GPRS, wideband CDMA (standard European 3G) and edge CDMA2K (American standard 3G) will be single-chip transceiver machines.

The story was pretty well buried in the  press release announcing that Motorola Ventures (and others) are financing the company. Original finance came from Nokia Ventures because they needed this technology, but the bandwagon is getting gratifyingly crowded.

A source inside Sequoia said: "The design cycle time in a multimode world, well, it's a nightmare  - especially trying to work out what modes are going to be appropriate two years out. That's why Nokia Ventures invested in us; this was becoming so much of a problem that they were taking a year out to solve it."

The source added: "This will reduce the RF design cycle by half or more."

Polar will also reduce the amount of power wasted, as well as making WCDMA phones more spectrum efficient, Sequoia said.