Specialty foundry Tower Semiconductor Ltd. (Nasdaq: TSEM; TASE: TSEM), which markets as TowerJazz, has expanded its collaboration with Britain's Nujira Ltd., a developer of envelope tracking (ET) technology. Tower will produce Nujira’s latest NCT-L1300 Coolteq.L ET modulator chip for LTE handsets.
Market sources estimate that Tower will make $25 million on the deal in 2014, and that the revenue will double to $50 million by 2016.
ET is the leading technology being developed to reduce power consumption of 4G smartphones in order to extend battery life. ET dynamically adapts the power amplifier supply voltage to the signal amplitude, reducing power consumption of the amplifier that transmits the signal to the antenna. ET interfaces have become standardized on LTE basebands, which paves the way to a very high adoption rate of this technology. As a leading ET developer, Nujira is well positioned to take a large portion of the market.
Tower cites a report by global information provider, HIS Inc., which predicts that revenue for analog application specific integrated circuits for 4G mobile handsets will grow 29% a year from $827 million in 2012 to $2.9 billion by 2017.
“Nujira’s technology has huge potential, with ET technology heading towards a 100% attach rate in LTE smartphones in 2014," said Tower CEO Russell Ellwanger. "Nujira’s chips combine wireless communications and smart energy, which are two high growth focus areas for Tower."
Nujira CEO Tim Haynes said, “Over the last year we’ve built an excellent relationship with TowerJazz; its processes offer us the ideal combination of high performance analog and power management capabilities."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 9, 2013
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