ParkerVision 2007 AeA Conference
November 11, 2007
Cynthia Poehlman, Chief Financial
Officer
Jeffrey L. Parker, Chairman and
Chief Executive Officer
Cynthia Poehlman: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to AEA. I'm Cindy Poehlman,
President and Chief Financial Officer, and presenting with me today is Jeff
Parker, our Chairman and CEO.
As you guys can see, we're going to webcast the session today. We're going to
ask that you hold questions until the end of the presentation, so we can take
those that are on the webcast. We will definitely leave some time at the end of
the address for any questions that you guys might have.
Let's get started.
First, I'd like to give those of you who maybe haven't followed the company
before a short little summary of who is ParkerVision. ParkerVision is a company
in the wireless communication space. We design, develop, and market silicon
verified IT based on our radio frequency technology.
What I mean by silicon verified IT is... Our business model is one of licensing
intellectual property to others. We do have an internal chip development team,
whose role is to produce and develop chips in silicon in order to verify the
benefits and the functionality of the technology. That's very important to our
marketing plan.
Our primary commercialization focus is on the mobile handset market, and
particularly the 3G and beyond segment of that market, where our technology
brings the most significant benefit. Our target customers consist of OEMs in
that market, and by OEMs, I mean not only the mobile handset manufacturers
themselves, but also their key semiconductor suppliers.
In some cases, the handset manufacturer track may compete and influence our...
To influence their key suppliers to adopt our technology, who may be the
ultimate customers.
Just a couple of quick stats on here: Market cap is about $350 million, so the
company shares outstanding, as of the end of last quarter, are 25 million. On the
site we had a dollar sign. That would be 25 million shares, not dollars.
We're a small company; less than 100 employees. We're based in
I'm going to touch just really briefly on financial highlights. We released our
third quarter results on Monday of this week, and for any of you who are
interested, the conference call from Monday is certainly available for replay
through our website. So, I'm only going to touch on a couple of items.
From a balance sheet perspective, a couple of important numbers for us:
Obviously, our cash... We're currently sitting at the end of the third quarter
with just over $17.5 million in cash. I'll talk with you in a minute about what
our cash usage has looked like this year.
We also have about $10 million in intangible assets. That is primarily
representative of the cost of the issued and pending patents. We have currently
just under 100 patents issued, 44
We've seen a pretty steady cadence over the last 12 months with four to five
new patents issuing every quarter.
From a P&L perspective, again just a couple of things to highlight: We do
have a small amount of revenue on the P&L this year, and that is from the
first licensing customer of our d2p technology.
Back in May of this year, we announced a relationship with ITT Corporation, and
although that relationship is not in our target market of cellular handsets,
they have a lot of synergies. Their product needs are very synergetic with our
current development plans, and the relationship made a lot of sense.
Now, the revenue that you see is from engineering design services that we've
provided to ITT to help them with their product planning and design. Obviously,
the more significant revenues will come with their royalty strength as they
begin to deliver products to market.
Now, we have a lot of non‑disclosures under our agreement with ITT, so I
can't really share with you what their product development timeline is, but
what I can say in general... We've reported that the design cycle is anywhere
from a 12 to 24 month period.
Also, I will point out that we have about $14 million in operating expenses on
a year to date basis. As you'll note, about 60% of that is R&D. Again, that
goes back to our internal chip development program, which is very important to
the company.
Obviously, as an essentially pre‑revenue company, we pray to the cash
flow god. The cash flow numbers are important to us. We have averaged about
$3.5 million a quarter pretty consistently in cash usage for operating and
investing activities.
But, one very important trend to note, especially this year, is that cash usage
has been largely offset by cash that we've seen coming in from the exercise of
outstanding options and warrants that have been in the $8 to $9 exercise price.
If you blend in the proceeds that we've received from that over this year, year
to date through September, we've actually used only about $4 million in cash.
You'll see, net cash actually is up for the year, $4.4 million, and that's due
to a small part that we did in February of this year, which brought in about
$8.4 million in additional capital.
So, that's the financials. Let's talk a little bit about the opportunity that
ParkerVision has in front of it. Obviously, I probably don't need to tell
anyone in here about the growth that you see in the cell phone industry over
the last couple of decades, and the growth is expected to continue. Over a
billion units being delivered annually now, and that's expected to grow to
nearly 1.5 billion over the next few years.
A lot of companies have emerged and made big names for themselves in this
market, largely through technological advances. Certainly, the need for
technology in this market is at an all time high. Service providers are looking
to become your one‑stop‑shop for both voice and data services, and
there are a lot of technology challenges in front of them.
So, we feel like ParkerVision's technology is very well positioned to allow us
to become a very integral factor in this next stage of growth in the cell phone
industry. To help you understand why ParkerVision feels like we're so uniquely
positioned and why we truly believe we have the ability to become the de facto
standard in this industry, there's a few things that we want to walk you
through in the presentation today.
One is, to help you a little with the understanding of what are the driving
trends in the marketplace. And more importantly, what are some of the
challenges that those trends have created for the manufacturers of cell phones
and their chip suppliers.
We'll talk a little bit about the competitive offerings, the attempts of others
to address some of these challenges in the industry, and the shortcomings of
those attempts.
And lastly, where does ParkerVision fit in? We think, we have a solution that
converges very nicely with the trends in the industry. On that note, I will
turn things over to Mr. Parker.
Jeff Parker: OK. Good morning, and thanks
for spending some of your AEA time with us.
So, it's going to be that we're going to talk today a little bit about the
trends that we see in this industry and how is our technology being developed
and evolved to address those trends, and why do we think it's such a good fit
with what this industry is looking for now, and in even longer term.
So, as Cindy mentioned, cell phone growth is continuing unabated. Somewhere in
the 1.5 billion units per year are projections for the next three or four
years. There is certainly no lack of market opportunity for this market segment
for our technology.
One of the trends, of course, is the roll out of 3G networks has now really
happened; still happening in some areas. But, carriers and network providers
are wanting to roll out data services. They don't want to just be your voice
provider, but, they want to do voice, they want to do data, they want to do
multimedia.
One of the challenges with 3G networks, however, is if you look at how those
networks achieve higher data bandwidth and more user capacity, the way that
transmission and reception of signals is to work is those waveforms are much
more complex than what was used in the 2G, like the GSM networks.
Those types of waveforms have really challenged the traditional transmitter and
power amplifiers, which are linear type approaches to transmitting radio
signals to give acceptable battery life.
The other trend that we see in this industry is the convergence of multiple
network access in single phones. Certainly, we're becoming a more mobile
society, and so, it's not uncommon to see users who want to have networks in
the
And of course, since the networks aren't all exactly the same, you're talking
about putting multiple modes of operation, multiple bands of operation, in
terms of radio frequency bands. That creates some real integration challenges
and size challenges for these types of products.
Then, in addition to that, the 3G networks, while they're a nice advance over
the 2G networks, the industry is already looking forward to 4G, which has even
more bandwidth delivery capability. And that brings with it its own set of issues
and challenges that are another really order of magnitude more difficult than
what we had to solve for in 3G, and what's still left to be solved in 3G.
One of the questions that we get asked by investors all the time is to help
them understand our solutions. Where does it fit into the need to... How do we
help people fix battery life problems, extend battery life, increase talk
times. When you look at a handset, where is the power being consumed?
Because people are seeing that there are improvements in various areas of the
handset, they want to understand, are those improvements minimizing our
benefit? Or, even as other subsystems in the cell phone are being improved,
there is still a big need to improve talk time to battery life.
Well, let's take a little bit of a look at that at kind of a high level. If you
look at a 2G GSM handset, that type of a handset is working on a system that is
not a continuous transmitted signal. It's bursting. So, when you do a phone
call, that transmitter is only on 1/8 of the time. It's off 7/8 of the time.
In addition to that, the power amplifiers, because the signals are relatively
simple signals, they're relatively constant signals. Those power amplifiers can
be matched to be very efficient to that type of a signaling set. And so you see
power amplifiers out there today that are greater than 50 percent efficient for
a GSM handset.
So, the net result between being efficient on the power amplification and the
fact that it's only a 1/8 bursted signal, you end up with talk time on a 900
million hour battery for a GSM handset... Five or six hours is not an uncommon
result.
Now, if you move over to 3G, a wide‑band CDMA line handset, you see a
very different picture. The signaling, when you're doing a phone call, is not
bursted. It's on continuously. The transmitter is on continuously. The receiver
is on continuously. That's one of the ways that those networks get more
capacity.
In addition to that, the signal that you're generating is a much more complex
signal, and it's dynamically changing significantly, in terms of what that
envelope of that radio signal looks like, and that does not make for efficient
use of linear power amplifiers when you apply those, that type of a signal with
the 2G DSM handsets. So, you typically see that those power amplifiers are less
than 40 percent efficient when you are at full power out of the handset. But,
the way those networks work is as you get closer to the base station, it turns
down the power to try to save energy and to try to keep the network capacity
high.
The problem is that as you start reducing the power out of the handset, the
efficiency of those types of power amplifiers actually drops off rapidly. We'll
show you some charts on this. So, even though you might be operating down more
to mid‑power level, not at full power level, on a wide band CDMA handset,
your efficiency is down significantly less than 20 percent and I'll show you
the charts. So, yes, you're saving some energy but you are still creating a
very inefficient transmit signal.
The net result of that is your talk times on a 3G handset wide band CDMA, you
know, they were predicted to be 2.5 to three hours, some people were hoping for
4. In reality, when you talk to network carriers today, they'll tell you, and
we talk to these guys all the time, a lot of them are telling us that they are
only getting an hour, quite a bit of their users, an hour and a half is pretty
common and two hours is on the outside. So, the carriers are not very happy
with this, because obviously they want long battery life. They want you on
their network as much as time as possible; that's how they make money. And if
the handset talk times are short, that's kind of going in the wrong direction.
So, this is one of the problems that is being pretty widely recognized today
that needs to be solved for.
So, let's talk a little about what are the competitive offerings doing today to
try to address some of these challenges and some of these shortcomings.
There are really two approaches in making a radio signal. We don't want to get
too deep into the technical discussion, but for you to have an appreciation of
what we are bringing to the industry, we have to do it a little bit of this.
Today, the transmitters are generally built off of linear type of systems ‑
linear modulation, linear power amplifiers. And they are typically known as
The other challenge with a linear power amplification technique is that they
are not that friendly to multiple waveforms. Sure I can put wide band CDMA
through one, but if I want to have the same amplifier for GSM, I'd have to tune
that amplifier in such a way that it would make it more inefficient for both
applications. So, it's not that I can't do it. I can do it. But, it comes at
the expense again of efficiency.
So, today, by the way, you open up handsets and looking at any of the tear down
reports you don't see a single transmit chain that are doing wide band CDMA and
GSM through the same chain. The chain for GSM is a chain for wide band CDMA.
You multiply that by the number of bands, and you end up with four, six, eight
power amplifiers and their associated chains in these handsets. And that is one
of the challenges that the industry is trying to resolve.
Then, there's the non‑linear approach. The non‑linear approach is
very interesting because what it says is, I'm going to run my amplifiers in a
switching class mode; meaning, more of a digital type of a transformation.
Now, if you look at a Class AB linear amplifier, it's maximum theoretical
efficiency. Depending on actually how you set it up, it is 50 or 60 percent.
And obviously, the devices and how you apply it then it degrades from there.
But, what's interesting about switching class amplifiers and the reason the
industry has been doing a lot of research on this over the years, is their
maximum theoretical efficiency is 100 percent. So, the allure is there.
The challenge with non‑linear amplification is it distorts the waveform.
So, you have to undistort that waveform somewhere in the process to keep the
spectral fidelity that you're looking for. Well, that can be done; not that it
can't be done. It's being done, but it's very computing‑intensive and
power‑hungry to do it.
So, where you see nonlinear in 3G is really in base stations, where you've got
unlimited amounts of power to work with and where the transmitted signal is so
large that computing power to undistort the waveform kind of disappears into
the equation. But, in a mobile handset, it is so power‑consumptive to do
these nonlinear techniques that nobody's brought one to the market that really
makes sense, efficiently, size‑wise, complexity, etc.
So, you've got linear designers implementing solutions. They're doing other
incremental things to improve those solutions. You've got nonlinear designers
trying to figure out how to apply switching amplifiers to the next generation,
and certainly, there's been tens and tens of millions of research dollars put
into trying to solve this problem.
What ParkerVision has done, and what's exciting about us and exciting to us
about, our ability to talk to you at this conference about our technology, is,
now that our patents have started to issue, we can be more free about what is
it we do. How does our technology work?
Last year, if you would've been here when we were talking about this, we really
couldn't talk too much about the internals of the technology, because we still
had all of our patents pending and we were still filing a lot of intellectual
property. While we'll continue to file a lot of intellectual property, some of
those patents now have issued, so we can speak more freely.
And what we've done that is very exciting is we looked and said, "A pure
linear approach has pros and cons. A pure nonlinear approach has pros and
cons." What nobody had ever contemplated doing before is, what if you
could blend both linear and nonlinear approaches into a single transformation?
And we figured out a way to do this in a manner that, when we create the
transmitted signal, we actually are switching our amplification in and out of
linear mode and nonlinear mode, in real time, as we're building the radio
waveform. And the net result is it allows us to operate nonlinearly most of the
time, but with the little bit of linear that we put in there, keeps the
waveform fidelity and exceeds the specifications required handily versus
anything you see out in the marketplace in linear today.
So, it's the blend of those two attributes that has a tremendous amount of
intellectual property opportunity for us, which is why we had to get it on file
before we could start talking about it, and it's what's brought this to a
practical solution for mobile products.
As our patents continue to issue, you'll hear more from us about this. You'll
be able to see for yourself. I think, you'll find it, if you're into this part
of the science, very interesting. It's certainly, we believe, a whole new body
of work that will take this industry in a new direction.
One of the things that we're able to show people today ‑ and this is one
of the reasons why we think we're so uniquely positioned to succeed ‑ is
that we have developed ICs now that, through a single circuit, can literally,
compliantly generate every single cellular waveform that is out there today.
Through one circuit, we can show you GSM (2G), EDGE (2.5G), wide‑band
CDMA (3G), HSUPA (3.9G), and then even the coming generations of 4G; LTE, which
is Long Term Evolution; mobile WiMAX, which is coming. And we can even show you
TD‑SCDMA, which is the Chinese standard that's emerging, and CDMA2000,
which, of course, is the Qualcomm standard.
So, from a single circuit... No, we're not necessarily from a single circuit,
wouldn't necessarily have the bandwidth to do every thing in terms of
frequency, but I can tell you that we can do everything as an example in the
PCS/DCS bands through one circuit for GSM and wide band CDMA, HSUPA and LTE and
CDMA2000 TD‑SCDMA. LTE is still a little bit of a wildcard because it's
still be decided by the standards committee ‑ where will it operate, what
the frequency will be, etc.
What's the unique convergence, or what new technology offering with the
unresolved industry challenges? Let's talk a little bit about that.
You can process any waveform, regardless of the complexity, at the highest
efficiency of anything that we're aware of. I'll show you some efficiency
curves here in a second, so that you can actually get your arms around that.
One of the things that provides the circuit designer is really a much better
trade off between different goals that they have than what you can do with
linear solutions today. Today you really have to make a big tradeoff between
how much integration do I want, versus what kind of efficiency am I going to
give up. Or what kind of waveform quality do I need to put out versus what kind
of efficiency. I can put bay station quality out today from a linear PA from a
handset at no efficiency. But, nobody wants to do that.
How much integration do I want versus waveform quality? We really relaxed the
trade off dramatically between those choices and that's obviously a very nice
place for circuit designers to be.
The other thing that you will see is our solution was really the first to be
able to provide a 3G talk time experience that's much more like what people see
in 2G. The reason we think that is important milestone is that if you just
listen to what people in the industry are saying, that's kind of what they are
asking for.
If you go back and look at a quote from Steve Jobs, when he was asked,
"Why didn't you put wide‑band CDMA in your first iPhones?" He
was very clear, he said, "I think, 3G is great. I think, someday we want
to have it. Obviously, we want the bandwidth capabilities, but the power efficiency
isn't there yet." He specifically said, until we can see our way clear to
a five hour talk time in a iPhone on a 3G network, it's not going in. So, this
is why we thought it was very important for us to be able to show that with a
technology like ours, you can start to look at 2G talk times, but on a 3G
network.
Here's an efficiency curve actually as measured on the bench by our Parker
customers and it's very interesting.
This really shows you where our competitive advantage in the efficiency area
is. This blue line at the bottom is a traditional linear gallium, arsenide
based power amplifier. You see this curve in most any wide band CDMA handset or
lower. This is pretty much the best in class curve.
So, you will see the efficiency at full power. On this one axis is
"Percentage of Efficiency" from low to high and then across this axis
is "Power Out from the Power Amplifier" from a few milliwatts all the
way up to about half a watt. What you will see is that these amplifiers start
out at about 40 percent efficient, but they rapidly drop off down to, you know,
20 percent efficiency, and even down to sub‑10 percent as you move across
the curve.
Now, a handset for wide‑band CDMA doesn't tend to spend most of its life
at full power. It tends to spend most of its life at mid‑power. So
really, the most part of the curve for a user, an actual user, is kind of going
to be in this area here where traditional linear power amplifier is going to be
something probably less than 20 percent efficient, maybe a little bit more than
10 percent.
Now, this green line here is showing what the trend in the industry is through
a traditional approach. People are putting multiple power amplifiers in a
package and they are switching them in and out, which is a nice improvement. It
doesn't really get you the total goal solved, but it is directionally helpful
in that this is a big power amplifier that takes you from full power down to
mid‑power, and then, at mid‑power you switch in a smaller power
amplifier that is a better size for the power output and it brings your
efficiency curve back up and then it drops off from there.
The challenge to that is, if you're operating most of the time in the mid‑power
region here, it doesn't really help you much. But, it does help you in the
overall use of a handset and, you know, if you were to go off and do the
calculations for how real users are using these handsets, you would be adding
minutes of talk time, you wouldn't be adding hours ‑ but, it's
directionally correct and it's helpful.
Our curve is this red line here, and, of course, the best curve you could ever
generate wouldn't be a curve at all; it would be a flat line. I mean everybody
in the industry would dream of having the highest number you could get all the
way across the power output, but that's very difficult to do because as you get
down lower and lower in power every little milliwatt becomes significant to the
efficiency. But, what you'll see is we're about 50 percent efficient at full
power, and we stay flat all the way down to 50 milliwatts, which is the mid‑power
level and starts to drop off.
This curve will literally add hours, depending on how much your battery is. If
you are currently getting an hours and a half, or two hours, you're going to be
more now in the plus three, maybe not quite to four hours of battery life,
depending on what's the rest of the componentry around it. But, that's the
significant talk time increase.
Now in addition to that, one of the unique advantages of our technology is
because it's a switching type amplifier, the size of the structures we use, our
efficiency performance actually improves with small geometry semiconductors.
Now, that's quite counter‑intuitive to this one industry because if you
think about generating a power device, what you're thinking about is building
big structures that can carry the power and that don't destroy themselves. The
way our technology is architected, and because we are in a switching class most
of the time, smaller structures are actually better for us.
So, here this chart is showing you what happens. Our first implementations were
in the 180 nanometer 'siggie'; those are IBM stats. The next generation is at
130 nanometer 'siggie', and look what happens. The efficiency goes from the 50
percent up closer to 70 percent, and it stays flat even further out. So, the
trend in smaller geometry silicon is definitely in our favor in this type of an
architecture versus this is not normally what you think of when you think about
analogues, moving analogue signals around, especially power signals.
Here, the thing we're going to show you is... This is what most people don't
talk about, you know. When most people think about power amplification they
focus kind of myopically on just power amplifiers, and certainly it's a very
important part of the puzzle, but they tend to forget about the modulator that
has to feed that power amplifier. So, when you add the modulator together with
the power amplifier, these are what these curves look like.
If you look at the traditional approach, even with its switched‑in second
amplifier, it tends to smooth out that curve not favorably by the way, and you
end up in the mid‑power region closer to 10 15 percent efficiency. When
you add in the rest of our puzzle, our modulator you'll see we are still in
that 40 50 percent efficiency range at the mid‑power level. What we're
trying to show you is that, even though we have something that's more software
driven that's not linear, when you add in the circuitry that drives our
switching class amplification, we don't give up that efficiency. Sure it comes
down a little bit, but it's still up very, very high.
So, there are also things we are very uniquely positioned to help people
eliminate, a lot of redundancies that they have to adopt today when they put
together multi‑mill, multi‑band comps. As an example, out of a
single arc output, at these kinds of efficiencies, we can operate all the way
from 1710 megahertz all the way up to 1980. That covers all the PCS bands, all
the VCS bands, for GSM, EDGE and Y‑band CD HSUPA. So, that's an example
of eliminating probably two or three chains of transmit circuitry you have to
use if you are using linear type approaches.
The other thing is once you adopt an architecture like this, your architecture
doesn't change. So yeah, you may shift frequencies around. You may want to size
your structures differently for more or less power output, but the fundamental
architecture doesn't change and the digital engine that drives it doesn't
change at all. It's generic. Whatever IQ goes into it, it will transform to
that waveform as long as you have enough bits of processing. The way we are
designing ours today, it will do anything from a WiMAX bandwidth all the way
down to GFL.
Last but not least, and this is what, I think, is one of the most interesting
aspects of this market. While just a few years ago people were arguing, was it
even worth deploying 3G networks. Would the money be there? Would the return on
investment be there? Well, now that that's kind of happened and those networks
are being, or have been deployed, this industry is already rushing off now to
forge. It's interesting to kind of watch it because the 3G networks, haven't
been perfected yet, the return on investment is still, you know, being sorted
through.
But, I think that this is definitely an industry where vision is preceding
reality, and the carriers are driving this industry saying, look it, we want to
be your one‑stop‑shop for all of your communication services and we
don't want you tethered with a wire. So, that bodes very well for the future,
and this is why we are so excited to be part of this industry. There are also
other challenges in 4G waveform, in terms of efficiency that are, frankly, even
more challenging than the 3G wave forms, which our technology addresses very
nicely.
So, the reason that we think we are on the road to success is:
No.1: While lots of people are talking about next generation ideas,
ParkerVision has it. It's been working silicon now. We have our first customer.
And you know, there have been many hurdles to cross because, you know, there
are a lot of purists in this space.
People have been using radio wave forms using linear power amplifiers for a
very long time. And you have people who argue for linear, you have people who argue
for switching class, when you show up with something as different as
ParkerVision shows up with, it takes a little time for people to come on the
page that, you know, maybe there is a better way to do it.
We're beginning to see that snowball effect now. We are beginning to see people
who are challenged enough to solve the problems of this industry. Their minds
are kind of opened up to new ideas.
Another thing with ParkerVision that has been a challenge, but we are getting
through it, is people say, you know, why ParkerVision? Why would an innovation
like this come from a company that we never heard of before? And in reality,
you look at history, many of these kinds of innovations that's exactly where
they come from. We're a typical company without a legacy product line, without
a legacy technology that we have to protect and defend. We don't have the teams
of people who are protecting any generational approaches and because of that,
not unlike a lot of companies who bring new ideas to market, that's oftentimes
where these things come from, and certainly there is a lot of patent issues
that will come to show the industry that would help them understand that our
innovation.
We have been evolving the silicon; we have a lot of demonstrable devices. We
have been very, very careful to make sure the intellectual properties portfolio
has been protected. That was a little bit of a slower go on the front end in
terms of commercialization, because we couldn't talk about what we do as openly
until some of these things start to issue. And it does tend to slow
commercialization down a bit.
We didn't want to be the company that comes to the industry with a great idea,
finally convinces people that yep, this is the way to do it.' Then the industry
says, well, we don't have to pay them because the fact of the matter is, they
didn't protect the IP, so its public domain.' We are not going to be in that
position. We have done a very careful and very thoughtful job of protecting the
IP that worked from the beginning with one of the best IP law firms in the
country and have followed a very carefully thought through IP protection
strategy.
Then, as I mentioned, we have our first customer, which is always helpful
because nobody wants to be the first. So, once you have the first customer,
nobody has to say anymore on the first, because they are not. Certainly not a
bad application to start out in a military space, for people know that
ruggedness is important, peak temperature range operation is important. I'm
obviously under nondisclosure, I can't possibly talk specifically about ITT's
products, but you can imagine military applications have wide range of
waveforms, lots and lots of challenges and this was a very, very good step to
help them address what they need for their next generation products.
Last but not least, we've gotten far enough down the road now with certain
commercial customers that we're in negotiation with and in our latest
conference call, we were confident enough to say that we believe they'll hear,
we have our first commercial customer that we'll be able to announce before the
next scheduled conference call. So, these are all the reasons, in combination
of what we believe, we're really on the right track to make a very successful
company out of this.
In terms of the business model, we really think our adoption will be into the
3G space and then beyond, and I'm sure there'll be some customers who will also
make sure that they want to have the backwards compatibility of the 2.5 and 2G
as well. The 3G seems to be the linchpin of what getting the commercial guys
excited about taking the step with us.
The other thing that's important about that is when we took on a customer like
ITT, which is a little off of our focus, we want to sure it didn't take us off
on a tangent, because our eye is on the commercial study. It's been very
fortuitous that as we were working with them, it's clear that their
applications can leverage a lot of the work we've done in the commercial
market. It doesn't take us off our path at all, and helps them, by the way, get
to market more quickly.
Timing, it depends on the complexity of the implementations, but we're so far
down the path now that there are customers we're talking to that if they use
what we've developed and productizes, that's probably about a 12‑month
design [unintelligible]. For companies who want products to different FABs or
they want more bands, more complexity in terms of how they're going to use the
technology, it could be out there more like 24 months. So, it's kind of the 24‑
to 12‑month design end depending upon where someone is starting from or
what they want to use from what we've already developed.
Our current focus is on intellectual property licensing. It's a pretty big jump
for ParkerVision to say, "We're not going to take all the work we've done
in building the recipe we have, and now go off and the build the team to
productize that. We'd rather leverage our recipe, our skill sets, our
knowledge, our intellectual property to help other people get products to market
more quickly. So, that's the base upon which we're talking to companies.
Typically, we think there'll be some fees for our design services that's kind
of what we do with ITT, where they said, "Hey, we'll pay you to help us
design the technology in the products, to help our teams take your recipe and
learn how to do it and please support us in that way." That's not going to
be the significant revenue, it'll take the company to the place we want to be
possibly but it's helpful. Every million dollars, half a million dollars, $2
million is helpful. Upfront fees for design tools and platforms, we see that as
a little bit of revenue because we do have design tools that help people get
the technology to their products more quickly. We have certain platforms; they
also can test the technology on and it makes their design entangled before. And
we have to receive or get some revenue from that.
Then, of course, where the real revenue will come from? From royalties and from
licensing. So, on that note by the way, we do have a receiver technology as
well. It's very complimentary to the transmitter technology. If you look at the
way the frequency planning for our transmitter works and you look at how our
receiver works, those two sit side by side, if you want to, very nicely in a
product. You don't have to use our receiver, but we're starting to see actually
quite a bit of interest from the companies who are looking at it. They're
adopting our transmitter as a follow on and a little bit down the road up to
adopting our receiver technology.
So, the way we deal with the pricing situation is obviously the question,
"What kind of royalty could you generate?" We always talk about value
proposition that exactly deal with ITT. We help them understand if you adopt
our technology, what's your goal of material cost doing it with our technology
versus doing it the traditional way? There's a savings there.
Obviously, the more complicated the application, the greater the savings. Even
on the low end applications, we're finding there's meaningful savings, and in
the low end applications, everything you can save is important to an OEM in
terms of cost. There is a value you can put on the talk time increase. If
someone says, well I don't really know how to price up the talk time increase,'
well you can say it's simple.' if we increase your talk time by the ability of
your battery to be 40 or 50 percent smaller, that's the value. You don't want
the more talk time; fine, shrink the battery. And people come on that page
pretty quick and those are very easy numbers to give, because everybody knows
how much per kilowatt hours battery costs are.
The space savings ability of our technology is important to OEMs because they
are being challenged to put more features in the products today, so they are
definitely looking to gain space for other things. There is value there on
that. And last but not the least, it is a scaleable technology. So once you
adopt it into your product line, you are not having to redesign every time you
are going to a different standard or every time you want to add things into
your transmitter receive chain. So, it becomes a cost savings from a design end
and from an engineering support standpoint. And we obviously take that value
proposition and we try and get OEMs on the page of giving a percentage of that.
I am asked all the time, what kind of range of possibility is that? If you just
go and look at tear down reports today, of companies who do those special types
of reports, you'll find a simple transmit chain for a 2, 2.5G phone, maybe 3,
3.5, four dollars range. That's the modulator, the PA; typically, that's for
low bands and high bands. If you go and look at a very complex phone today,
more of the smart phones where you've got wide‑band CDMA, GSM and Edge
and all the bands are being covered for world phone type applications, those
are more in the $20‑25 range on just the transmit size. So, it's kind of
a pretty big range. But, there is a meaningful savings in just the bill of
materials that we can make in either of those applications.
Will we end up getting half? Will they split the savings with us? I don't think
so, but will we get some meaningful percentage between splitting it and zero? I
believe we will, at least that seems to be the indication at this time.
So, what are the next steps to watch for from the company? Well, commercial
design wins, obviously that's one. I think that most investors are quite
interested in it, because it doesn't make any difference how good we think the
technology is, the question is how good do people who can adopt the product and
use it in volume say that it is? You'll watch more patents issuing. As Cindy
said earlier, we have about four or five patents a quarter issue. Our first d2p
transmitter patent issued earlier this year. I think, you'll see a couple more
issued probably this year or very early next.
And the other thing that's exciting is that, we are going to be able to start
talking about this technology, as I said earlier, more openly. We are now being
asked to speak at conferences that you would expect to find industry leadership
attending.
People have asked us over the last couple of years, "why aren't you guys
at those conferences?" And our answer has been, because we can't talk as
openly about the technology as you have to at conferences like that, you can't
talk about a black box.' Now we are able to talk about this, we'll be speaking
at those conferences, we'll be giving details about this technology. We'll also
be issuing white papers from those conferences, which will be helpful to those
people who want to understand more about why does this technology provide the
benefits that it does, where can you evaluate it, and last but not least we'll
be refreshing and updating our website based on all this type of information
availability.
So, we appreciate the time that you've spent with us, and I think that now we
will open up your questions to...
[At this point Cindy Poehlman walked
over to the person running the camera and cut off the recording. The questions
and answer were not recorded.]