WTRS Executive Interview

Interview with Dr. Michael Farese, President and CEO of BitWave Semiconductor.

August 18, 2008

George: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background? I know you have extensive experience in different aspects of the wireless telecommunications and the telecommunications industry. How did you come to BitWave?

Michael: I've been in Telecommunications for a bit more than 35 years now; and in the last twenty years, I've really focused on wireless telecommunications and especially cellular. I've been quite involved in developing numerous cell phones and handsets used in the industry. During the 1990s, I worked on TDMA and AMPS handsets, and more recently I led the development of multimode handsets and other devices for multi-band GSM and wideband CDMA networks.
Before coming to BitWave I was the Senior Vice President of Engineering and Head of Product Development at Palm Corporation in Sunnyvale, CA. At Palm, we were developing and launching the Palm Treo products. The Palm Treo product family spans all of the cellular standards including GSM, WCDMA, and CDMA/EVDO; we naturally worked with various carriers and ODMs. This provided me good visibility into the wireless industry both in terms of market requirements as well as new technologies.
And really that's how I came to know BitWave; I had been following some of the developments at BitWave during the last year and I'd been impressed by their unique product architecture. Certainly what BitWave was doing had the potential to be revolutionary and disruptive to the industry. I believed that BitWave's technology could provide a capability that device manufacturers could immediately use across their product families.
I also knew several industry colleagues on the BitWave board. Osmo Hautanen, who is a BitWave board member, was a colleague of mine at Nokia for about 5 years during the 1990s. And I also had previously met Hans Schreck, another BitWave board member. So I also got to know quite a bit about BitWave from those two gentlemen.

George: What can you tell us about BitWave the company? What is the company's mission?

Michael: The mission of BitWave is to be the leading supplier of programmable transceivers that can be used in the wireless industry. Initially we are focusing on wireless handsets, data cards, and femtocells, which are small base stations that can be used in the home.
Bitwave has developed an industry leading programmable transceiver. If you consider the implications of transceiver programmability, one can quickly identify many applications beyond the cellular space which are also commercial opportunities for Bitwave.
For example, in addition to our primary markets, there are potential applications for frequency agile, programmable transceivers in entertainment devices, navigation and GPS, and in homeland security and defense.
However, our initial target is for wireless devices that can be used to provide broadband connectivity using both cellular and wireless broadband protocols such as WCDMA, GSM, LTE, and WiMax.

George: You've identified a very sweet spot in the marketplace. We just spent the past few days at the Embedded Systems Conference here in San Jose and one of the things I noticed was the number of companies selling nano-routers or micro-routers which had two or three protocols - some of them were wireless and some were wireline - but they were trying to solve the problem where one side of the network is on a specific network technology and the other side is trying to be connected into a broader Internet, a broader world of wireless technologies. This is what we thought was very exciting when we spoke at CTIA.

Michael: I would agree that the wireless industry is moving quickly to multi-protocol and multi-band devices. A number of broadband protocols have been developed and standardized to provide the high bandwidth connectivity necessary to support all the high value applications that we'd like to use on our mobile devices, applications such as Internet browsing, mobile TV, streaming video, real time music, and location based services.
These are high value applications to the end user and they are also high value applications to the carrier because they drive ARPU. The challenge for the device manufacturer and the semiconductor manufacturer is how to enable these applications across all the infrastructure and mobile devices that the carriers have deployed yet keep cost and size low and keep performance high and to do this in a timely way. And given that there are many complex protocols deployed in many different frequency bands from 700 MHz to 4 GHZ this is indeed a challenging problem.
One of the key requirements for a mobile device is that the solution must be low power or power efficient. BitWave has been very focused on this aspect of our solution. After several years of development, BitWave believes that we have developed a flexible, programmable solution which is also low power yet offers very good RF performance.
That is the challenge that BitWave took on and that is the challenge that we feel we can, for the first time in our industry, solve with our flexible, programmable transceiver.

George: At this point can we drill down into the technology? Can you tell us what is unique about the BitWave approach to solving this problem?

Michael: The first point I want to reiterate is that it is unique. That is one of the first strengths that I saw in BitWave and it really motivated me to come to the company. For the past ten to fifteen years, the industry has dreamed of a programmable transceiver for mobile devices, but it has never been realized. The industry needed a new architecture which could support a low power solution and still be protocol and frequency agile.
That architecture is at the heart of BitWave's innovation and is why the BitWave Softransceiver is unique. BitWave's programmable architecture combines the "art" of analog with the "science" of digital. Starting with typical analog super-het architecture for performance and power efficiency, BitWave integrated elements of digital control into all the major functional elements. The Softransceiver has digital registers that control the function and the shape of many different analog circuits. Using BitWave's API, the baseband modem can control the performance of the Softransceiver simply by setting register bits that change the operating point of the analog circuits in the Softransceiver. The Softransceiver's configuration can thus be quickly modified to deliver the desired performance. The software and configuration information which is necessary to specify the performance of the chip is called a "mode file".

George: One of the benefits here is if you are a handset manufacturer or if you are a network operator, you can provide a product with the same level of connectivity while reducing the number of radios that you are required to implement in a particular handset.

Michael: That's right. You are dramatically reducing the number of SKUs that you would have to develop because the BitWave Softransceiver is really a platform product. As a platform product it can be programmed to implement many different radio variants.
I like to think about the Softransceiver as an RF microprocessor upon which we can load software which provides the microprocessor its application identity. That is a very elegant solution to a difficult RF problem. I believe we will be the first to enable truly programmable mobile radios as we bring our product to general availability and volume production during 2H08.

George: We spoke at CTIA about what people think of in general as software-defined radio (SDR). Can you go into the differences between the BitWave transceiver and the traditional concept of SDR?

Michael: This is a very different approach than what has been traditionally used for software defined radios. The traditional SDR approach is to take the signal that is coming directly off the antenna and to digitize it in a very high speed ADC (analog-to-digital converter). The data stream is then provided to a general purpose DSP which operates on that bit stream to extract the signals of interest.
There are several problems with this approach. One, the components are expensive. A high-speed, high-quality ADC that doesn't introduce noise is very expensive for handset applications. Also, typical sampling rates must be very high to ensure that all the relevant signal information is captured; and the DSP has to operate at a high speed as well. The real rub is that the combination of those items significantly increases power consumption. It is not an approach that has ever been effectively implemented in a battery powered mobile device.
BitWave's approach is entirely different. BitWave still uses traditional analog circuits in its Softransceiver; circuits like low noise amplifiers, mixers, filters and VCOs. However, those analog circuits are configured using digital control bits which are aggregated into mode files. The mode file is what provides the chip with its product identity. They are quite moderate in size and memory usage.
The Softransceiver is not high cost because the implementation is done predominantly with analog circuits but realized in standard bulk CMOS processes; and fabrication is done at a high volume Taiwanese fab.

George: What BitWave enables is a number of different optimization routes for a handset manufacturer in order to characterize a particular handset at the same time doing it in a manner that saves power and lowers costs.

Michael: What you are starting to touch on is our value proposition. Let me see if I can elaborate on that. There are several elements; the first one is that it enables the device manufacturers to bring products to market more rapidly. This is because they have a platform upon which they can develop multiple products by simply loading different software. The platform is built on a stable, well-characterized CMOS transceiver chip. Different mode files or software files can be loaded onto that transceiver platform to create multiple products. These Softransceiver products can be done in months whereas a new single-purpose CMOS transceiver development would typically take 1.5 to 2 years. That's a huge difference.
A second element of the value proposition is that the Softransceiver is more efficient in reducing the number of parts in the total device bill of materials. It saves significant cost. An example would be a multimode phone which requires two or three transceivers and two or three basebands. The transceiver RFICs for such a device can all be replaced with a single BitWave 1102 Softransceiver running multiple mode files. In addition, the discrete part count necessary to support those multiple transceivers is also reduced and would thus save additional space on the printed circuit board (PCB). Fewer parts generally would consume less power on the board and that has the direct beneficial effect of reducing heat. Cooler parts generally exhibit improved mean time between failure. Your supply chain becomes a lot simpler too since you are not dealing with two or three transceiver manufacturers, you are just dealing with one. That's a second important element of the value proposition.
The third one is the one you were touching on. For example, assume the desired use case requires Quad band GSM and W-CDMA at 2100MHz. If the product configuration (i.e. Baseband and RF Front End) is fixed for that application, then we can optimize the performance of our Softransceiver so that the best RF performance is achieved for that overall product design. We can fine tune the performance using our mode files, our software controls, to optimize performance for any specific configuration. And that's a great advantage to the device manufacturer.

George: This is absolutely a fascinating approach.

Michael: I believe this will be the first time that such a set of capabilities as provided by the Softransceiver are realized in the industry.

George: Is there anything I should have asked that I didn't?

Michael: I would say a few additional things in summary. We are very pleased to be working with a number of handset OEMs and Femtocell OEMS. This is a transition year for BitWave where we are going from having demonstrated the technology at the end of '07 to now going into high volume production by the end of '08. We are transforming from a technology company to a strong operational semiconductor company. One of the reasons that I came to Bitwave was because I felt that I could help the company make that operational transformation.

We're looking forward to beginning high volume shipments to leading OEMS. It has been great fun getting here and completing the technology development. We're transitioning into a pretty exciting time operationally.

George: This is one of the coolest things I've heard in a long time.

Michael: It really is. As a handset designer, I've been looking for a product like this since from about 1995. There have been attempts at it but none that I saw ever showed the promise of the Softransceiver.
We are initially focusing on the three major markets that I mentioned earlier, handsets, data cards and femtocells. There are many other applications where this technology can be used, some of which we may not even have thought of, and that's really exciting!

George: Thank you.

More information about BitWave Semiconductor here...

This interview ran in our August 18, 2008 newsletter issue.