Nujira wins handset design slot for low-power PA

LONDON — Nujira Ltd. (Cambridge, England), an RF engineering startup, has announced that its Coolteq technology for reducing the power consumption of power amplifiers has achieved a design win and purchase agreement with a handset maker.

The company's name was not disclosed, but the company was described as a "top-five" handset maker. The value of the purchase agreement was not disclosed.

Nujira announced that the technology, previously deployed within basestations, had been extended to handsets in February. A little later Nujira announced that it had received money from a team of Japanese investors.

Coolteq is said to halve the cost and double the battery life of a 4G terminal RF frontend compared with existing technologies, as well as covering three to five times the bandwidth of a standard design. Nujira suggests only two PAs would be needed to design a front end covering all 14 bands defined in the 3GPP for LTE, and all of the operating modes (GSM, EDGE, WCDMA, HSUPA and LTE).

"This is the first time Coolteq-l has been independently assessed by a major handset OEM and we are delighted that our own measurements of the power consumption and bill of materials advantages have been confirmed by our customer," said Tim Haynes, CEO of Nujira, in a statement. "Since announcing our handset technology at MWC we have experienced enormous levels of interest from multiple areas of the handset supply chain including the OEMs themselves and expect other deals to soon follow."

Nujira said that a handset PA implemented using Nujira’s Coolteq-l is twice as power efficient during HSUPA transmissions, and 1.5 times as efficient during W-CDMA transmissions compared with the same PA without Coolteq-l.

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