RF Micro Devices, Inc. (Nasdaq: RFMD), a leading provider of proprietary radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) for wireless communications applications, announced today that it has shipped its 10 millionth POLARIS™ cellular transceiver. The Company attributes the shipment milestone to continued strong sales of its EDGE transceivers.
The Company's best-selling cellular transceiver is the POLARIS 2 Total Radio transceiver for EDGE handsets, and RFMD is the leading supplier of merchant market EDGE transceivers. The Company also anticipates an aggressive ramp of its POLARIS Radio Module to its lead transceiver customer as well as a new customer for EDGE handheld devices.
Based upon existing customer forecasts, RFMD currently expects sequential growth in POLARIS transceiver shipments in the December 2005 quarter. Beyond December, the Company also expects multiple EDGE phones will launch throughout calendar year 2006 featuring its POLARIS transceivers.
"POLARIS is the RF solution in ten million handsets to date, and we anticipate continued success as our POLARIS products support future, high-volume handsets in 2005 and 2006," said Eric Creviston, Corporate Vice President of Cellular Products at RFMD. "Given the performance, size and cost advantages of current and future POLARIS RF solutions, RFMD is enabling handset manufacturers to design smaller, more feature-rich handsets with increasing levels of functionality."
RFMD's POLARIS transceiver product portfolio is comprised of the POLARIS 1 transceiver chipset for GSM/GPRS handsets, the POLARIS 2 transceiver chipset for GSM/GPRS/EDGE handsets and the highly integrated and size-reduced POLARIS Radio Module for both GSM/GPRS and GSM/GPRS/EDGE handsets.
In a September 2005 report by industry research firm iSuppli entitled, "RF Transmitter Architectures for Next-Generation Mobile Handsets," iSuppli identified open loop polar modulation architecture as the preferred architecture of choice for next-generation mobile handsets. Open loop polar modulation is the architecture featured in RFMD's POLARIS transceivers.