NVIDIA, Renesas and GCT Team Up for Tegra 3 with 4G LTE

NVIDIA has apparently decided to try its hand at the 4G LTE business, even if only in an indirect fashion.

The company has entered a collaboration with GCT Semiconductor, through which they will pool their resources and built a reference design for OEMs.

NVIDIA will contribute the Tegra 3 SoC (system-on-chip), while GCT will add the LTE single-chip, GDM7240.

“Wireless operators are looking for the best mobile platform solution in terms of speed, connectivity and application processor,” said Dr. Kyeongho “KH” Lee, president and chief executive officer of GCT Semiconductor, Inc.

“By combining NVIDIA’s excellent graphics and display performance with GCT’s advanced LTE single-chip solution, we believe we can provide a very attractive turnkey design for LTE smartphones and tablets. We’re pleased to be working with NVIDIA to advance the 4G ecosystem.”

Renesas will add its baseband technologies as well. The result will be a new platform for mobile consumer electronics devices that will have Tegra 3 computing, graphics and browsing performance, plus support for LTE and 2G/3G broadband.

“The pre-integration of our modem and the performance of NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 quad-core processor present an unbeatable combination for the development of the next generation of high performance ultraphones,” said Jean-Marie Rolland, CTO and executive VP of sales and marketing for Renesas Mobile Corporation.

“This relationship will set the benchmark in performance for devices launched in the next 4-12 months.”

There was no word on how long it would take for any jointly developed products to appear, though.

At the very least, NVIDIA has effectively prevented the appearance of rumors of incompatibility between Tegra SoCs and Long Term Evolution wireless connectivity.

“GCT is one of the leading providers of LTE modem technology,” said Michael Rayfield, general manager of the mobile business at NVIDIA.

“Bringing together their technology with Tegra 3 helps our partners create quad-core LTE mobile devices that we believe will impress customers with outstanding performance and longer battery life.”