With millions of dollars in venture capital on hand, a White Plains semiconductor company said it will spend the next year bringing to market a new technology that promises to change how the worlduses cell phones, PDAs and other wireless devices.
Sandbridge Technologies Inc. has spent the past several years perfecting a chip system technology that lets wireless customers use a single device to access all the world’s wireless standards – from the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and Global Systems for Mobile Communications (GSM) standards used by most of the world’s cell phones, to wireless fidelity or “Wi-Fi” as well as Bluetooth and multimedia applications.
Another half-dozen new wireless standards are expected within the next few years. As those standards bit the market, Sandbridge can add them since its patented Sandblaster baseband processor uses reprogrammable chips that can store software and receive new software via download.
The technology can also be programmed to receive broadcast frequencies like AM and FM radio.
“We could add a. lot of different features to a portable device,” said Guenter Weinberger, Sandbrdge’s president and chief executive officer. “Our value proposition is to be able to handle different protocols and applications simultaneously, not queuing them up and processing them one after another. That’s not the right way to do it with real time applications.”
Up till now, the handsets of cell phones relied on traditional hard-wired, fixedfunction chips capable of receiving a single wireless standard. The technology has the potential to speed up the long-ballyhooed convergence of voice, video and data functions via a single wireless device.
The technology tested successfully in February at a trade show, the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, Weinberger said.
Sandbridge is a relatively small company among those in the emerging technology of software-defined radio or SDR.
But it appears to be farther along than giants like Intel Corp., whose SDR technology is in research phases, and Texas Instruments Inc.
“Software-defined radio is potentially a very hot area Over the next three to five years, the changes we’ve seen in mobile devices are likely to be eclipsed dramatically,” said David Yedwab, an analyst with the Eastern Management Group in Bedminster, N.J. “Sandbridge appears to be thinking about it the right way,”
Established in 2001, Sandbridge is a “fabless” semiconductor company; it designs chip systems, but outsources the task of fabricating them. Sandbridge employs 45 employees and consultants and is based in downtown White Plains at the Gateway building (1 North Lexington Ave.).
Sandbridge has raised $26.5 million during its second round of venture capital
financing, allowing the company to operate through the middle of 2005,
Weinberger said. By the end of that year, Sandbridge hopes to generate $50 million in revenues by selling its technology to customers, namely the world’s manufacturers of wireless devices. For 2006, Sandbridge has projected revenues of $100 million.
One such company positioning itself to be an early customer is German-owned Siemens A.G., the electronics and electrical engineering giant. Its Siemens Venture Capital subsidiary awarded $3 million in VC money to Sandbridge in a deal announced June 30.
As part of the deal, a Siemens investment partner, Rudolf Harmann, was named an observing board member of Sandbridge.
The Siemens award was one of two venture capital awards Sandbridge completed over the past five weeks. The company has since racked up another $4 million from a group of investors led by Castile Ventures of Waltham, Mass.
While no customer agreements have been signed for the new technology, Weinberger said it is far likelier to emerge in overseas regions that are already more advanced in deployment of wireless than the United States.
“We are more focused on the Asian and European markets when it comes to customers, rather than the United States,” Weinberger said.
Copyright Westfair Communications Aug 04, 2003
