25th March - InterDigital announced that its SlimChip mobile broadband modem turned in market leading performances in HSDPA benchmark testing conducted by Signals Research Group, LLC, a widely-recognized independent research consultancy, and Spirent Communications, who provided its test equipment and engineering support.

In Signals Research Group’s recently published report, “Chips & Salsa VIII: The I’s Have It!,” InterDigital was included as one of only three companies to submit a product that achieved Category 8 HSDPA data speeds. The report highlighted the strong performance – either at the top or among the leading group of three Category 8 solutions – of the SlimChip modem in a battery of tests. Moreover, the report underlined the importance of throughput and receive diversity as being important in the data-centric applications that are the SlimChip’s focus market.

Michael Thelander, Founder and CEO of Signals Research Group, commented in the report, “In our performance tests there were seven solutions from six companies that we tested at Category 6 HSDPA (3.6 Megabits per Second), and six solutions from three companies that we tested at Category 8 HSDPA (7.2 Megabits per Second). InterDigital’s solution performed very well in the Category 8 tests, and its best results seemed to occur in more challenging network conditions. With further optimization of its solution InterDigital’s SlimChip Reference Platform should be strongly positioned to compete for design wins within the embedded and external communications modem market.”

InterDigital’s SlimChip products feature a “slim” modem architecture where the modem – which provides core wireless connectivity – is separated from the applications processor and peripheral functions. This approach allows wireless device manufacturers to customize the pre-certified modem, in a rapid and cost-efficient manner, to specific mobile broadband devices such as data cards, smart phones or feature phones.

SlimChip products feature advanced receiver technology with receive diversity, providing enhanced interference mitigation resulting in higher data speeds and better coverage. The SlimChip design supports speeds up to 10 Mbps in the downlink and 5.7 Mbps in the uplink respectively.

“Signals Research Group is a highly respected independent research consultancy that offers thought-leading field research and consulting services on the wireless telecommunications industry and we were eager to have our SlimChip product participate in this performance analysis,” commented Mark Lemmo, Executive Vice President, Business Development. “Even though our SlimChip is in the later stages of pre-commercial testing and certification, we are pleased that it performed well in these tests and received the distinction of being one of only a few product solutions to achieve Category 8 HSDPA speeds. As we move toward commercialization, we are continuing to optimize SlimChip’s HSDPA capabilities and we also look forward to testing its HSUPA performance in the near future to show that SlimChip delivers high speed mobile broadband performance on both the downlink and the uplink.”

InterDigital’s SlimChip family of high performance mobile broadband solutions offers manufacturers flexible options to accelerate their time to market with advanced 2G/3G products with HSDPA and HSUPA capabilities. The set of SlimChip products includes high performance baseband ICs, broadband modem IP, and complete reference platforms. The company is now accepting requests for customer sampling and operator trials.