About Icera
Icera is the world’s leading company in the design, production and sales of soft modem chipsets that deliver high performance communication engines for cellular products. These chipsets are at the center of our lives today - smartphones and tablets plus modules and USB sticks that turn our notebooks into internet-everywhere devices.
As a result of our unique system architecture, our products are able to combine the highest user throughput and advanced modem features with the smallest footprints and the lowest costs, allowing us all to have smaller, faster and more affordable high technology devices.
Our direct customers are the world’s largest cellphone product manufacturers, who select our technology, buy our chipsets and deliver products to mobile network operators on a global basis. Since the launch of first Icera-powered products in 2007 in Japan, a further 40+ global operators have now approved Icera technology on their networks, including the largest US and European providers. As a result, Icera has evolved from being a small start-up to becoming the #2 vendor in mobile broadband products and is now set to become the challenger in high performance Android smartphones, for which we are delivering platforms in partnership with leading application processor vendors.
Icera’s chipset is made up of our soft baseband silicon, based on our new DXP® processor technology, combined with our radio frequency silicon to form an integrated platform on which we develop air interface technology. All of this technology is developed in software and runs on our DXP® processor. This software model allows us to innovate quickly, achieve fast time-to-market and exceed the throughput performances of our competitors by a significant margin and with no power or system cost penalty. Today, we focus this capability on the largest markets for cellular technology – GSM/GPRS/EDGE (together 2G), WCDMA/HSPA/HSPA+ (together 3G) and LTE (4G). Our software supports both voice and data services and we support customers with reference systems, development and debug tools, drivers and engineering support services. There are no real limits on the number of standards we can ultimately support and we plan to add new air interfaces to the platform on an accelerated basis as we grow our business.
From a standing start, Icera already employs over 300 staff and has major design locations in the UK, France, USA and China with customer support and sales offices across Asia, Europe and the USA. The company is strongly backed by some of the world’s largest venture capital firms, who have invested $250M of equity funding into the business since its founding in 2002.