Deutsche Bank ranking puts Icera up and ST, NXP down

The relatively lowly ranking for ST and NXP may indicate one reason why ST and NXP agreed to merge their wireless businesses to create a third-place joint-venture with annual sales of about $2.9 billion, twice the size of fourth-placed Infineon Technologies AG.

However, it is clear that analysts at Deutsche Bank will not see size alone as a reason to move the ST-NXP venture up the 3G baseband ranking.

According to the note, NXP has the Nexperia PCF0501 offering WCDMA/UMTS capability and undergoing interoperability testing, and started sampling HSDPA silicon at 3.6-Mbits per second in Q3 2007. However, 7.2-Mbits per second and HSUPA capability is not sampling until the first half of 2009, the note added.

ST's entry for WCDMA/UMTS 3G baseband is "no products." For HSPA the observation is that ST has a Nokia supply agreement with first products targeting the first half of 2010.

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