picoChip appoints Steve Laurenson as VP Engineering

15th March 2007

ES Admin

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picoChip has announced the appointment of Steve Laurenson to the newly-created post of VP Engineering. A 28-year veteran of the mobile communications and semiconductor industries, Laurenson will take on a customer-oriented role, ensuring that picoChip continues to develop and support the technologies and products required by the wireless market.

Laurenson joins picoChip from Agere Systems (formerly Lucent Technologies Microelectronics), where, amongst other roles, he established the company’s 50-strong European GSM Development Centre. In this role, and subsequently as Agere’s Mobile Terminal Division’s Technical Services Director, he has extensive experience in directing teams to develop, deploy and support handset reference designs. He will bring these talents to picoChip’s own range of reference designs, serving customers in the highly cost-competitive wireless market.

“Organisationally, this is a key appointment,” said Guillaume d’Eyssautier, President and CEO of picoChip. “Steve’s appointment will focus our development teams on serving our customers in the WiMAX and femtocell sectors which have grown to be our core business. He will work closely alongside our CTO Doug Pulley, who will take on a strategic role in driving the company into new markets. In this way we can achieve the next step-change in our development: the move towards our ambition to be a $100million company.”

“I’m delighted to be joining picoChip,” said Laurenson. “The company has first class technology and I’m looking forward to making my contribution to maintaining that leadership. Working alongside Doug gives us the structure and resources to produce technology today that perfectly serves customers’ needs, whilst simultaneously looking ahead to newer developments such as IEEE 802.20 and Ultra Mobile Broadband.”

picoChip provides software-defined radio solutions to address the key challenges of cost, development time and flexibility for the next generation of wireless systems. The company’s multi-core processors deliver a world-beating price/performance combination. Uniquely, the company also delivers complete, standards-compliant reference designs for UMTS (HSDPA, upgradeable to HSUPA) and WiMAX/WiBro (both 802.16d and 802.16e, with support for AAS and MIMO). 802.16-based systems using picoChip are available from Airspan, Intel, Ericsson, M/A-Com, Marconi, Nortel and a number of other manufacturers. The company also has strategic relationships with ETRI and Korea Telecom in Korea and both ICT and BUPT in China. picoChip technology is also being used to develop other 4G wireless protocols such as UMTS-LTE, 802.20 and
TD-SCDMA.