ISuppli Tears Apart the Huawei HSDPA Card

An iSuppli Corp. teardown analysis of a Huawei's HSDPA wireless card for mobile PCs is showing that the device is part of a wave of first-generation offerings intended to pave the way for future mass-market products that have more streamlined and cost-reduced designs.

iSuppli's Teardown Analysis Service conducted a dissection of the Huawei E620, a PCMCIA card that works with 2G tri-band GSM and 3.5G HSDPA. The E620 provides a relatively seamless wireless high-speed Internet connection for mobile PCs that have PCMCIA slots.

The E620 carries a materials and manufacturing cost of US$79, according to iSuppli's teardown analysis. In comparison, the average materials and manufacturing cost is only about US$12 for PCMCIA wireless LAN cards that offer higher downlink speeds, but with much less range and coverage (meters versus miles) than HSDPA delivers. However, the cost of HSPDA cards can be subsidized by wireless service providers, which could reduce the difference in cost between HSPDA cards and wireless LAN cards seen by customers.

"Designs for HSDPA wireless cards need to pursue additional cost reductions to help the standard realize its full market potential as a mainstream technology for high-speed wireless data communications," said Andrew Rassweiler, teardown services manager and senior analyst for iSuppli.

HSDPA leads 3.5G race

Most of the early implementations of HSDPA have been in the form of wireless data communications cards. As of July 2006, there were 25 such cards on the market, including the Huawei E620.

However, the greatest market potential for HSDPA over the long term resides in new 3.5G mobile phones that support fast data access speeds, as well as voice communication. In July, 19 HSDPA 3.5G mobile phones were on the market, some of which have similar designs and components to the E620.

Outside the E620

The Huawei E620 is being offered by Vodafone in the United Kingdom for a price of about US$272, with a minimum one-year contract. Due to this relatively high price and the expense for HSDPA network usage time, the target market for the card is limited to business users who require data communications in the field. For the purposes of its teardown analysis, iSuppli is assuming a two-year product lifetime and a total production volume of about 500,000 units for the E620.

Other companies producing HSDPA cards include Motorola, Siemens and Sierra Wireless.

Inside the E620

The US$79 cost for the E620 consists of US$6 in production expenses and US$73 for materials. Major cost drivers in the E620 include the Qualcomm Inc. MSM6275, a Digital Baseband Processor (DBB) that integrates support for Quad-Band GSM/GPRS, GPS, UMTS, HSDPA and Bluetooth wireless communications. The MSM6275 has an estimated cost of US$29.50, representing 40.4% of the E620's total materials expense.

Other major cost drivers include Samsung Electronics's K5D1257DCM-D090, a memory Multichip Package (MCP) that integrates 512Mbits of NAND flash and 256Mbit of SDRAM. At US$7.70, the K5D1257DCM-D090 accounts for 9.7% of the total product cost.

The table below and attached summarizes major component cost drivers in the E620.

Source: iSuppli Corp. November 2006

The Huawei E620 contains 612 components, putting it within the normal range for other wireless data cards analyzed by iSuppli. However, with data cards torn down by iSuppli having an average component count in the low- to mid-500 range, the E620 resides at the high end of data cards in terms of number of parts.

Design deja vu

The design and part selection of the E620 was familiar to iSuppli's teardown team, with the card using many of the same major chips seen in many previously dissected mobile phones. In fact, the core semiconductors in the E620 are almost entirely the same as those in the Samsung SGH-Z520 mobile phone.

The E260 uses a standard Qualcomm chipset, including the DBB, an RF transceiver, an RF receiver and a power-management integrated circuit.

Cost is king

For now, the E620's cost and design are adequate to serve its purpose as an early product designed to seed the market for HSDPA. However, significant cost reductions will have to be achieved before HSDPA is optimally positioned to penetrate the wider mass market.

The E620's relatively high component count provides plenty of opportunity to produce a more streamlined design that uses fewer passive components. iSuppli expects second-generation HSDPA cards and mobile phones to be less costly to build-and less expensive for consumers to buy."

Posted to the site on 8th November 2006