Icera opens new facility in France

Icera France has already seen strong growth since it opened its first facility in January 2005, already doubling the number of its employees in 2006 to 45, with a further 15 people expected to join by the end of the year. Icera has opened a brand new 1200m² engineering facility at WTC1, Route des Cretes, in the Sophia Antipolis business park. The new centre will be dedicated to 3G and 2G layer 1 protocol development, system integration, validation and certification for next generation mobile phones and devices. Icera's European business development and sales team is also located in Sophia Antipolis. Stan Boland, President and CEO of Icera, commented: "Sophia Antipolis is a unique center in Europe where we can attract and retain world-class wireless communications engineers. We've had a great experience with building a team here and are now confident in pushing ahead in expanding our operations. Icera solutions are already being designed into major carrier products and we are now looking to significantly expand our software engineering team to fuel our future success." Headquartered in Bristol, UK, with top-tier European and US investors, Icera is intent on becoming a global leader in high volume cellular baseband chips and software. Icera's technology - the Livanto® wireless soft modem - is a disruptive new architecture for mobile phones and datacards. Together with Icera's Adaptive Wireless™ software, Livanto delivers the world's highest performance cellular broadband via the latest version of the 3G standard, HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), enabling consumers to download large email files with attachments to mobile phones, speedily access web pages and download music tracks to media players over the air in seconds. Already supporting GSM, GPRS and EDGE, Livanto will be developed for additional air interfaces, such as HSUPA, WiMAX and Mobile Digital Video, which can be consolidated on the same device. Early versions of Livanto have been sampling since September 2005, in parallel with achieving interoperability and network testing. Since the physical layer and protocols are all in Adaptive Wireless™ software, advanced receivers and diversity support are delivering dramatic performance advantages in HSDPA, doubling sector capacity and halving baseband costs. The fundamental new soft architecture of Livanto breaks the vicious cycle of handset availability lagging infrastructure for new standards. As well as being amongst the first to market with a 3.6Mbps HSDPA solution, Icera aims to drive the availability of faster and more complex standards through software upgrades on the same Livanto device - but without the time and cost of developing, verifying and manufacturing new silicon. OEMs can deliver the same terminal, tailored to the standards and features of different geographic or consumer markets through software instead of hardware changes, quickly and easily. After sale, they can be field-upgraded as new infrastructure is rolled-out: a revolution in handset communications technology.