AT&T offers wireless digital cellular, personal communications

DALLAS -- March 3, 1993 -- At a press briefing at the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association conference here today, AT&T Microelectronics presented a complete wireless component solution for the new dual mode (analog/digital) IS-54 North American cellular standard.

The standard promises to triple the number of calls that can be handled by cellular operators while also improving the quality of voice transmission for their customers.

AT&T is first to market with chips that perform radio functions for IS-54 terminals. Last week, the company introduced a companion baseband signal processing chipset for IS-54 terminals.

"Our IS-54 antenna-to-voice solutions are just the beginning," said John Pilitsis, International Sales and Marketing Vice President. "AT&T has a unique combination of expertise in low-power semiconductor technology and a top-down understanding of end user and network service provider needs.

"Those capabilities enable our customers to provide smaller, lighter handsets with longer talk time and better voice quality, to support mobile data communications and to drive the market for new, highly portable personal communications products and services," he said.

Over the next decade, AT&T Microelectronics will invest $6.4 billion in advanced process technology, packaging, DSP architecture and applications design support aimed at delivering highly integrated, portable, low-power solutions for terminal manufacturers. Support for the IS-54 standard will be complemented by support for GSM, JDC and other standards in markets around the world.

The first components in AT&T Microelectronics strategy were announced in February. Together, they provide a complete communications engine for the IS-54 standard. They include:

• The first dual mode (analog/digital) 900 MHz transceiver chipset designed for the IS-54 cellular standard. The devices perform virtually all of the radio functions for portable cellular terminals.
• A low-power DSP-based chipset for baseband signal processing compliant with the IS-54 standard and operable with a 3 volt power supply. Developed in conjunction with Mitsui & Co., and Technekron Communications Systems, Inc., the four chips in the offering are each smaller than a dime, allowing the design of trim, lightweight portable instruments.

Previously announced products that support AT&T's thrust into the wireless components market and enable vendors to differentiate their product offerings include:

• DSP 1610/1616 high-performance signal coding DSPs for digital cellular base station and mobile terminal applications, respectively.
• DSP 1616 VSELP Engine, a self-contained vocoder for cellular and speech compression applications.
• The CSP 1084 IS-54 baseband to radio interface unit and the CSP 1027 IS-54 baseband to audio interface unit.
• The Hands-Free Voice Processor, which provides speaker-trained voice recognition for hands-free dialing.
• Mobitex® two-way wireless data-transmission architecture support in the AT&T V.32bis and V.17 Complete Modem Chipset, the first on the market to support both high-speed landline and wireless communications.
• The Hobbit microprocessor and supporting chips, the enabling engine for a new class of devices known as personal communicators that will ultimately take advantage of DSPs and the digital cellular infrastructure to provide anywhere, anytime voice, data, image and full-motion video communications.

For product literature, call the AT&T Microelectronics Customer Response Center, 1-800-372-2447 (in Canada, 1-800-553-2448; fax number +1-215-778-4106 (especially for customers outside of North America); or by writing to AT&T Microelectronics, Dept. AL-500404200, 555 Union Boulevard, Allentown, Pa., 18103.

AT&T Microelectronics offers a full line of high-performance components and electronic systems to original equipment manufacturers, for applications in network computing, telecommunications, cellular/wireless and video. Included in the product line are CMOS, Bipolar, GaAs and high-voltage custom and standard products, communications devices, graphics and speech processors, interconnect products, lightwave products, and power supplies.