NTT DoCoMo has scrapped plans to create a joint venture with regional chipset makers to develop and sell semiconductor products for LTE devices, after its partners failed to agree on a plan to move forward.
The operator states the joint venture agreement with Fujitsu, Fujitsu Semiconductor, NEC, Panasonic Mobile Communications and Samsung Electronics has been terminated and that Communication Platform Planning, the wholly owned subsidiary the cellco had established to prepare the formation of the JV, will be liquidated in June.
DoCoMo gave few details of the break up, beyond stating that the joint venture agreement had been terminated “because a consensus on the details of the envisioned company could not be reached by the target deadline.”
The firm’s original agreement, signed in December, aimed to establish a fabless joint venture by end-March that would “develop feature-rich, small-size, low-power-consumption semiconductor products equipped with modem functionality” with a specific focus on developing products for LTE and LTE-Advanced devices.
The JV – which had been slated to formally kick off at the end of March - also set its sights on the global market, with one objective being to help Japanese and Korean chipset players compete against heavy LTE hitters like Qualcomm to power the next generation of mobile devices.
The collapse of the JV comes a month after DoCoMo, NEC, Panasonic and Fujitsu (but not Samsung) announced they had jointly developed software and hardware intellectual property for a large-scale integration (LSI) chip for GSM, W-CDMA, HSPA+ and LTE that would enable energy-efficient modems that could reduce power consumption in LTE devices by 20% in communication and stand-by modes.