NXP Announces Strategic Initiative to Fast-Track 5G

BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 22, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ:NXPI), a worldwide leader in the cellular infrastructure market, today announced the strategic alignment following the merger of NXP and Freescale of comprehensive products and technologies to meet the complete system challenges of 5G. NXP’s comprehensive portfolio of low and high power RF technologies are being combined to address 5G demands of bandwidth, linearity, power-efficiency and small form factor solutions.

Streaming high quality video, connecting a multitude of devices, allowing real-time communications, while providing extremely low latency monitoring of any environment are just some benefits from 5G wireless. To enable these capabilities, radio architectures need to significantly evolve and utilize macro to small cell base stations that operate in frequency bands from a few hundred megahertz to tens of gigahertz.

“With the recent combination of NXP and Freescale, the key building blocks for creating the highly integrated, high performance RF front end solutions 5G requires are now aligned under the NXP umbrella. The combination of NXP’s industry leading Si-LDMOS, GaN and SiGe helps to ensure that the full range of 5G power amplifier variants can be addressed in the most highly integrated, cost competitive manner possible,” said Paul Hart, senior vice president and general manager of the RF power business at NXP. “We have the unique opportunity to deliver mobile device levels of power amplifier integration at infrastructure power levels.”

Delivering 5G frequency and power requirements

A key enabler of NXP’s initiative to fast-track 5G is NXP’s exceptionally comprehensive RF process capabilities, which span the low, medium and ultra-high frequencies that 5G systems will require. Silicon LDMOS has been the primary RF process technology for base station power amplifiers from the market’s inception, through the build-out of 4G LTE. NXP’s LDMOS will continue to play a significant role in the 5G era as well, providing high levels of integration necessary to support massive MIMO based systems below 3 GHz.

In higher frequency deployments, NXP will leverage its optimized gallium nitride (GaN) process technology, which will complement LDMOS in products designed to support frequencies higher than 3 GHz. And for the exceptionally high centimeter and millimeter-wave frequency bands that 5G systems will require, NXP will leverage its silicon germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS process technology. In fact, NXP today is a leading supplier of automotive radar chipsets, which leverage NXP SiGe technology to operate in the 77 GHz range. Additionally, NXP’s SiGe-based low noise amplifiers deployed in today's cellular markets are increasingly replacing high cost GaAs based solutions for infrastructure, mobile and user equipment.

Providing flexibility and programmability in signal processing architecture

For processors, NXP is leveraging its vector signal processing architecture (VSPA) into scalable devices that will be perfectly suited for the flexibility required by 5G systems relying on beam-forming and massive multi-user MIMO. Announced last year, the AFD4400 Digital Front End (DFE) System-on-Chip (SoC) covers the entire transmit, adaptation and receiver functionality, while keeping the data path fully software programmable. The flexibility and programmability effectively enables the data path to be reconfigured for various antenna and bandwidth requirements. When operating with a wideband transceiver, this platform makes the concept of software defined radio a reality. Combined with NXP’s baseband processor solutions, for example, the QorIQ Qonverge B4860 device, the AFD4400 provides an ideal development platform for 5G systems.

From the core of the network to the antennas and back, NXP’s broad portfolio of baseband, radio, antenna processing, RF front-end solutions and software help to ensure 5G system success.

Demonstration

An example of a high performance yet compact micro cell radio design, demonstrating NXP’s unique position to supply RF power and low noise amplifiers along with the matching digital front end solution, can be seen at the NXP booth (7E30) at Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona. 

About NXP Semiconductors

NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ:NXPI) enables secure connections and infrastructure for a smarter world, advancing solutions that make lives easier, better and safer. As the world leader in secure connectivity solutions for embedded applications, NXP is driving innovation in the secure connected vehicle, end-to-end security & privacy and smart connected solutions markets. Built on more than 60 years of combined experience and expertise, the company has 45,000 employees in more than 35 countries.

Forward-looking Statements

This document includes forward-looking statements which include statements regarding NXP’s business strategy, financial condition, results of operations and market data, as well as other statements that are not historical facts. By their nature, forward-looking statements are subject to numerous factors, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes and results to be materially different from those projected. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Except for any ongoing obligation to disclose material information as required by the United States federal securities laws, NXP does not have any intention or obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements after NXP distributes this document, whether to reflect any future events or circumstances or otherwise. For a discussion of potential risks and uncertainties, please refer to the risk factors listed in NXP’s SEC filings. Copies of NXP’s SEC filings are available from the SEC website, www.sec.gov.

NXP, the NXP logo and QorIQ Qonverge are trademarks of NXP B.V. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. © 2016 NXP B.V.

For more information, please contact:NXP Global Technology PRTate TranTel: +1 408-802-0602Email: tate.tran@nxp.comNXP Global Technology PRJack TaylorTel: +1 512-560-7143Email: j.taylor@nxp.com

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