Lucent Technologies Microelectronics Group's new Everest 900MHz digital cordless chip set will enable cordless phone manufacturers to deliver products with world class clarity and range at up to half today's typical costs. Customers already planning the introduction of phones using this chip set include Thomson Consumer Electronics and BellSouth.

New CLEAR-EFECT (Enhanced Forward Error Correction Technology) chip set software from Bell Labs, combined with advanced Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FH/SS) technology, provides enhanced voice clarity and range improvements of up to 15 percent. This software is powered by two 100 million instructions per second (MIPS) digital signal processors (DSPs), producing the most powerful chip set available in such a low-cost consumer application.

"Lucent's solution provides tremendous horsepower for advanced digital cordless telephony, while performing like misers on power consumption. I'm convinced that it will help drive substantial price reductions of digital cordless phones to about half today's typical prices - into the $50 range," said Jack Quinn, a wireless semiconductor analyst with Micrologic Research.

The 900MHz digital cordless phone market is expected to grow at an estimated 57 percent annual rate from this year through the year 2002, according to Forward Concepts, a DSP market research firm. The market is expected to expand from an estimated 4.4 million units in 1998 to 26.5 million units by the year 2002.

"The Everest chip set will make quality digital audio an affordable reality for mainstream cordless phone customers," said Steve Kaufman, general manager of consumer integrated circuits with Lucent's Microelectronics Group. "With Bell Labs' CLEAR-EFECT technology, the static, interference and eavesdropping headaches of today's analog cordless phones will be eliminated."

The chip set equips digital cordless phones with an unprecedented 200 MIPS of processing power. The set consists of two B900 DSP chips; two CSP1009 Communications Signal Processor chips, which are four-channel codecs; and two W9009 radio-frequency (RF) transceiver chips designed for the 900MHz ISM band. The B900 is a new version of Lucent's DSP1609 (announced last year) specifically created for 3.3 volt operation, with additional memory.

One B900 chip, which is equipped with 100 MIPS of processing power, will be placed in the cordless phone base station; another 100 MIPS B900 will be in the handset. A CSP1009 and W9009 will also be used in the base station and handset.

Because the B900 is software programmable, it provides customers with rapid feature customization and upgrades. Manufacturers who want to add new features to their digital cordless phones can do so implementing software upgrades to the B900 rather than having to buy new chips. Lucent also offers FlashDSP technology to the cordless market, which can reduce the time required to reprogram chips from months to minutes or even seconds. The Everest chip set comes in both a pin and function compatible FlashDSP version for development and a diffusion Read Only Memory version for mass production.

Talk to any analog semiconductor vendor with RF product capability and you will probably hear it said that Lucent is not a competitor, because whatever they produce can be beaten on price in the near term. This chip set may give those vendors a different experience given the combination of the DSP power thrown into it and the fact that it is only three ICs for both the base station and the handset. The pricing will allow for the production of $75 to $80 phones, not the magic $50 speculated on in the release.

Lucent's proprietary forward-error correction technology certainly appears to work extremely well in the tests that I have seen and the 900-MHz market for digital cordless is the next big jump for the consumer: I certainly wouldn't use an analog cordless phone anymore if I wanted a private conversation. This chip set will sell in extremely large quantities and my guess is that Lucent will have the market to themselves for about nine months; there is, however, a large loyalty factor in this market and some OEMs will probably wait for "their own" vendors to bring out comparably-priced sets, and in the meantime will lean hard to push prices down on existing products.