Icera under NVIDIA
The $ 367 million acquisition of Icera, a leader in RF technology and wireless modem, by NVIDIA is completed as per an announcement made by the company today. Icera is the leader in the field of innovating top-performing wireless modems for 3G and 4G cellular phones as well as tablets. From now on Icera will be a subsidiary of NVIDIA and will continue to operate under the old Icera Trade brand.NVIDIA enters the field of mobile Devices
With this acquisition, NVIDIA now has the two main processors used in smartphones, the application processor as well as the baseband processor in their kitty. The application processor is available as the NVIDIA Tegra super chip while the baseband processor will be based on the Icera technology. This combination is surely going to help the OEM customers to improve their time to market and at the same time is capable of catering to the requirements of the latest trends in the field of mobile computing. This is expected to nearly double the revenue opportunity of the company.
A Significant Step
In NVIDIA’s strategy to place itself as the foremost processor company in the post-PC era, this is going to be counted as a very significant step. This particular deal is expected to provide the users with a fully optimized and complete mobile platform and will open up the baseband processor market by bringing in a talented team to NVIDIA.
About Icera
The baseband and RF technologies offered by Icera expands among the 2G, 3G and 4G networks and with the NVIDIA Tegra Mobile super chip it is going to offer a real powerful combination. The programmable processor architecture of the Icera baseband will allow NVIDIA to innovate new signaling algorithms in the mobile telecommunication domain that is evolving rapidly and will make it possible to integrate the Icera baseband processor into system as well as software platforms.
Prospects and Benefits
This acquisition of Icera is expected to bring changes to industry standards and interfaces as well. The programmable GPUs offered by NVIDIA has given breakthroughs in the parallel processing system and are expected to make supercomputing affordable and widely accessible at the same time. The OEM partners of NVIDIA are expected to benefit from the enhanced performance due to better integration and will offer a whole new market to NVIDIA as the 15 billion dollar global market for baseband processors is considered as one of the fastest growing areas of the industry of mobile computing.