Agere Joins Open Standards Group

Agere Systems has joined the global Open Base Station Architecture Initiative (OBSAI). Agere offers many critical technologies and components for wireless base stations. These include digital signal processors (DSPs), RF power transistors, world-leading traffic management silicon and highly sophisticated serializer/deserializer (SerDes) "macros" that are available to all of the OEMs that Agere serves with custom silicon.

"We certainly welcome Agere to OBSAI at this important juncture. We have finalized the key interface specifications, and all of the promoter and supporter companies, including Agere, are busy engaging with our mutual partners and customers," said Jukka Klemettila, chairperson of OBSAI. "I'm especially pleased at how quickly we've accomplished many of our goals and the level of cooperation I see under the OBSAI umbrella. Operators and mobile broadband users are sure to benefit."

Most importantly to OEMs searching for the key interface silicon they need, Agere has a fully validated and tested SerDes that is 100% compliant to the newly ratified OBSAI Reference Point 3 radio interface specification.

OBSAI was formed among leading base station vendors and module and component manufacturers to create a set of open specifications for base station architecture. By defining a basic modular architecture and the detailed specifications for the internal interfaces between modules, OBSAI aims to create a market for cellular base stations that will substantially reduce the development effort and costs that have been traditionally associated with creating new base station products. Not only will wireless operators benefit from greater competition among base station vendors, OBSAI promoters say, but they will also have the opportunity to bring new and advanced services to market earlier.

"OBSAI is a potentially elegant and low-cost solution for multi-standard BTS solutions," said Mike Elser of Agere's Networking IC Division. "Agere's system-on-chip (SoC) integration expertise with our OBSAI-compliant SerDes and widely-deployed DSP intellectual property will help us to provide solutions to our customers that allow them to deploy wireless broadband systems faster."

Over 75 companies have joined OBSAI to deploy next-generation wireless broadband earlier and at less cost than would otherwise be possible."

Posted to the site on 4th March 2004