Sivers Semiconductors signs development agreement with Indian 5G technology supplier

Sivers Semiconductors AB (“Sivers”) today announces that its business unit, Sivers Wireless, has signed an $320k (MSEK 3.3) agreement to develop a novel 5G mmWave prototype to showcase a solution targeting the Indian 5G market.

The agreement includes the development of a 5G millimeter prototype based on Sivers’ newest highly integrated 5G mmWave RFIC, and antenna array integrated with the Intel Agilex baseband platform. The development project is expected to deliver a set of prototypes within five months. The prototypes will be used in a field trial with one of the Indian mobile operators. After a successful field trial, it is expected that the customer will engage with Sivers to further industrialize the design and get ready for volume manufacturing to serve the Indian market.

Spectrum auctions in India concluded on August 1st, 2022, with the 5G mmWave FR2 26GHz band receiving bids worth INR 147 billion ($1.87 billion). This has spurred significant recent activity for the development of 5G mmWave infrastructure and devices in the Indian ecosystem. The adoption of 5G is expected to increase India’s telecom industry’s revenue (total revenue including service and full system sales) by INR 1 trillion ($12 billion) every three years, based on market research*, and the industry is expected to reach INR 10 trillion ($120 billion) by the end of 2023. Other research** indicates that the Indian 5G market has the potential to become the second largest 5G market worldwide by the end of this decade.

“This agreement is interesting and important to Sivers for three reasons. The first and most obvious one is that it is a proof point that our new RFIC leads the competition with its strong performance and high level of integration, especially in a highly competitive market like India. The second reason is that this activity will expose us to one of the world’s top three telecom markets and, assuming we are successful, we could see very interesting volumes being deployed in a not-too-far future. The third reason is that it will secure baseband integration with one of the leading 5G baseband suppliers within the semiconductor industry ”, says Anders Storm, Group CEO, Sivers Semiconductors.

The monetary value of the agreement is $320k (MSEK 3.3) and will be executed during December-22 to April -23.

* Market report issued by Techarc: https://indbiz.gov.in/5g-to-increase-telecom-industrys-revenue-by-inr-1-trn-every-3-years/

** Market report issued by Astute Analytica:  https://www.astuteanalytica.com/industry-report/india-5g-market