Specialty foundry Tower Semiconductor Ltd. (Nasdaq: TSEM; TASE: TSEM), which markets as TowerJazz, today announced that it has signed major contracts and is expanding its share of the fast-growing multibillion-dollar Front-End Module (FEM) market, supplying its Silicon Radio Platform (SRP) for smartphones and other mobile systems.
The company's share price rose 7% on the TASE this afternoon to NIS 25.50 and was up 7% in pre-market trading on Nasdaq at $7.14, giving a market cap of $144.4 million.
Tower’s SRP integrates radio in mobile devices, including in components such as antenna switches, antenna tuners, diversity switches, controllers, low-noise-amplifiers, and power amplifiers, eliminating the need for expensive discrete gate all round (GaA) devices. Tower's silicon germanium (SiGe) power amplifier processor is built in 0.18-micrometer technology to enable efficient integration of power amplifier, controller, and Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI), at 40% of the cost of GaA's, while enabling new tunable features and affording levels of integration.
Tower estimates that the transition from GaAs technologies to silicon and SiGe technologies will more than triple the portion of the FEM market available to Tower in the coming years, and that the company is well positioned to manufacture a major portion of the devices that will serve this market. It cites the 2012 report by Mobile Experts LLC, which states that the handset front-end market will double to $10 billion by 2017 and the number of RF paths will to grow to 20 billion.
“These megatrends, coupled with the slowing of Moore’s law, will create even more opportunities for specialty technologies such as those provided by TowerJazz: analog, RF, SiGe, power, MEMS, and CMOS image sensors to offer even more differentiation and create opportunities for system level optimization of performance,” said Tower CEO Russell Ellwanger. “By mastering both digital and analog technologies, TowerJazz is in a unique position to ride these trends successfully and grow more rapidly in the marketplace, as being evidenced by our FEM market leadership."
In a separate development, Tower announced that it has received the Foundry Supplier of the Year Award and the Quality Iron Man Award for the fourth time from Skyworks Solutions Inc., an innovator of analog and mixed-signal semiconductors for a broad range of end markets.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on March 11, 2013
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