Nvidia Puts 3G and LTE Modem Business Up For Sale

Nvidia is turning its attention to gaming, automotive, and cloud computing applications, as they are now looking to sell their 3G and LTE modem business.

Nvidia announced it will cease its Icera operations in the second fiscal quarter of 2016. They purchased Icera for $367 million in 2011 in hopes of becoming a big name in the smartphone industry. However, it turned out to be nothing more than a dream as rival industries such as Qualcomm Inc. took their business. Several Android-based tablets using Nvidia’s chipset also failed to sell well.

Nvidia expects the Icera 4G LTE modem supply to last at least until their self-imposed 2016 deadline, but the company expects to join forces with third-party modem suppliers and will no longer develop its own once that day is reached.

The Icera 450 slim-modem platform worked with NVIDIA Tegra processors to enable high-performance HSPA+ smart phones and tablets. It had a full 3G and 2G voice, a radio interface layer for Google’s Android OS, and major PCB savings from integrated baseband and integrated RF chips. Their platform is based on the ICE8065 baseband and ICE9225 RF IC. Some specifications of the platform include:

HSPA+/3G/2G multimode
Multiband HSPA+ Cat 18 (28Mbps)
HSUPA Cat 6 (5.7Mbps), Cat 7 (11Mbps) HSUPA upgradable
Quad-band GPRS/EDGE

Nvidia has nearly 9,000 employees worldwide, 500 of which were part of the Icera modem operation. They were based primarily in the UK and France, with some smaller teams located in Asia and the United States. The company had a reported revenue of $4.13 billion in 2014, and an operating income of $496 million.

The future of the 500 employees working on it is unclear as of now, as are the details of what they will do with Icera. More information is expected to come out later in the week when reports for the first fiscal quarter of 2016 are released.

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