www.infineon.com - www.huawei.com

Infineon Technologies and Huawei Technologies announced today at a signing ceremony in Beijing that they will join forces to offer a competitive WCDMA mobile phone platform. Through this partnership the two companies are creating a new business model to meet the specific customer needs in China. Both companies strongly believe this will support the large-scale introduction of WCDMA in China.

Infineon Technologies, a leading provider of 2G to 3G chipsets and complete solutions, will contribute the reference design and protocol stack software for the development of WCDMA mobile phone platform. Huawei will complement this cooperation by providing its leading-edge technologies on its strong WCDMA network expertise, terminal testing, and broad experience and technical advantages in IOT (Inter-Operability Testing) between mobile terminals and mobile systems. By joining forces for this end-to-end solution, both companies will speed up the integration of WCDMA mobile phone platforms, through the development of application software, the integration of the protocol stack software, and provision of high-performance WCDMA RTT algorithms.

Generally, WCDMA mobile phone manufacturers specialize in supporting multimedia communications and high data-rate for high-end users. The Infineon-Huawei partnership will bring about a competitive voice-centric WCDMA mobile phone platform for the mass market.

"The winning combination of Huawei's and Infineon's complementary know-how enables the two companies to offer highly competitive WCDMA handsets that satisfy the specific needs of China, the world's largest mobile phone market," said Dr. Ulrich Schumacher, President and CEO of Infineon Technologies.

Infineon has lately taken a series of measures including increasing investment in China, establishing joint ventures, and forming new partnerships. The co-operation with Huawei is part of Infineon's commitment to China

Ms Sun Yafang, Chairman of Huawei, said "Huawei has invested heavily in WCDMA, the mainstream 3G standard. We have mastered the complete set of technologies from core system technology to chip design, and emerged as one of the few in the world that can provide comprehensive commercial systems. The partnership with Infineon will enhance Huawei's capabilities to provide end-to-end WCDMA solutions, better serve the needs of operators and end users for low-cost WCDMA mobile phones (by offering voice and SMS services) and promote 3G development in China."

She added:" In the area of mobile terminals, Huawei is committed to developing low-cost 3G handsets and bringing the benefits of 3G to the general population. Huawei will endeavour to provide end-to-end solutions and quality services to operators and end users by combining the unique features of different mobile phones with Huawei's competence in the wireless business."