Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

Icera, which announced recently that it would be recruiting a further 75 software engineers at its newly established Cambridge base to quench its “insatiable thirst for software programmers,” will see its technology take the performance of HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) up to the standards of its wired counterpart.

After its first product on the market decimated the competition, including mobile giant, Qualcomm’s yet-to-be-released ‘next generation’ unit, the company says it is confident about its future place in mobile internet.

“There is stiff competition in the market, with big players like Qualcomm, Broadcom and Ericsson Mobile Platforms, but I see us in the top two or three within five years,” said co-founder and CTO, Steve Allpress.

The fabless semiconductor firm, which was founded in Bristol by a team including Stan Boland, one-time CEO of Acorn and founder of Element 14, designs cellular chipsets and software aimed at making mobile internet perform well enough to deserve the ‘broadband’ moniker.

The company, which operates bases in Cambridge, Bristol and the South of France, plans to take the HSDPA market by storm, generating a significant increase in transfer speeds, enabling the technology to compete with existing wired connections.

It said that the move to ramp up its operations in the East of England was driven by the need to recruit an increasing number of staff able to cope with the advanced technology it is developing.

“Our silicon team is based in Bristol with our software programmers here in Cambridge,” said Allpress. “But as the scale of the company changed, we developed an insatiable need for software programmers, and Cambridge provides a wealth of brainpower in that area.

“Our software allows us to be more aggressive with the performance of the wireless-algorithm specific processors, allowing a level of productivity which is not usually possible.”

Icera said that its current product, embedded on a datacard shipped by Softbank, formerly Vodafone Japan, generates 48 per cent better performance than other products on the market, including the widely publicised Huawei unit being pushed by O2 and 3, among others.

Ironically, Chinese company Huawei is looking to set up a Cambridge scouting base to look out for new technologies.

Allpress said: “We are set to release a USB HSDPA modem, which with an embedded antenna has a much higher form factor than existing products on the market. We expect it to ship in the millions.

“You will see lots of these on the market in the near future, including the same technology embedded in laptops, in the same way that computers are shipped with WiFi. And we expect to be a dominant player.

“Aside from the current pipeline of HSDPA-plus products, we are also working on  LTE (long term evolution), which aims to generate download speeds of 100 Mbits per second.”

Icera has just completed its fourth round of fundraising bringing the total attracted by the firm to a cool $140m, a sum which it says will see it through to an IPO planned for 2009.

While details of the newest round were not disclosed, previous cash has come from, among others Hermann Hauser and Amadeus.
The company employs 195 staff worldwide, with plans to increase the number to 275 by the end of next year.