Icera Soft Modem Selected for Vodafone 14.4 HSPA USB Stick

BRISTOL, England, May 25, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Icera Inc., the Mobile Broadband semiconductor company, today announced that its Livanto(R) chipset and Adaptive Wireless(TM) technology is at the heart of Vodafone's latest mobile broadband USB stick, the Vodafone K3805-Z.

Offering a high speed mobile broadband connection with theoretical peak downlink rates of up to 14.4 Mbps HSPA in optimal conditions, the Vodafone K3805-Z is the world's first USB modem to incorporate Icera's IceClear(TM) interference-aware technology. IceClear(TM) uses sophisticated signal processing algorithms implemented in software to cancel the effect of interference from other cells, potentially delivering up to triple the previous average connection speeds for Vodafone customers in weaker signal areas and improving network efficiency and reliability.

Ralf Elias, Head of Global Product Management and Innovation at Vodafone Group, commented: "Our aim is to provide our customers with a best-in-class experience of services through Vodafone's high-speed mobile broadband network and we track and selectively collaborate on innovative technologies with cellular chipset partners to achieve this. Icera's unique soft modem technology, including the latest IceClear(TM) interference aware receiver, shows how this directly benefits our customers' experience."

Stan Boland, President & CEO of Icera Inc., said: "Interference-aware receiver technology has been known to achieve substantial user throughput and cell capacity gains for some time, but until now has been prohibitively complex and expensive to implement. The advantage of IceClear(TM), to manufacturers, operators and customers, is to deliver this technology in software at no additional silicon cost. Users will notice the difference for sure and we're thrilled to have Vodafone as a launch operator."

Vodafone's K3805-Z will be available from Vodafone across Europe and selected African countries.

About IceClear(TM)

IceClear(TM) provides material gains in user throughput right across the cell site but with particularly high gains towards the cell edge. In representative tests, IceClear(TM) increases the throughput by a factor of up to 3.6 times.

Until now, the mobile broadband user experience has tapered from the high rates achieved when the user is close to the base station, to much lower data speeds at the cell edge. Previously, the data throughput has been further limited at the cell edge due to interference from signals transmitted by adjacent cell sites.

The use of traditional equalizer and diversity technology in mobile broadband chipsets materially improved user data rates compared with earlier rake receiver systems, however data rates remained poor at the cell edge in loaded networks. Hardware-based methods of cancelling the dominant interference sources require additional complex and silicon-hungry signal processing algorithms. For these cost and complexity reasons, no other mainstream HSPA chipsets have delivered interference cancellation technologies in production products to date.

Unlike any other baseband technology, Icera's Adaptive Wireless(TM) executes the entire modem in software on a specific high performance processor. This approach produces a unique flexibility to develop and implement advanced algorithms, which can adapt dynamically to specific channel conditions, in software, without the need to add any extra silicon blocks to the chip.

IceClear(TM) is included in the latest version of Icera's Adaptive Wireless(TM) soft modem providing a significant enhancement to customers with what is already independently recognized as the industry's top-performing HSPA mobile broadband technology.

About Icera

Icera is a fabless semiconductor company, pioneering high performance, low power, soft modem chipsets for the fast growing mobile broadband device market. Icera technology delivers the highest performance modem solutions for USB dongles, datacards, laptops, mobile internet devices and smartphones. Founded in 2002, Icera is headquartered in the UK, with design locations in the UK, France, North America and China, with customer engineering and sales offices in Europe, Asia and the US. For more information, visit the Icera web site at http://www.icerasemi.com.

SOURCE Icera