ParkerVision was founded in 1989. It has never had a profitable quarter.

From 1989 to 2004 its main product was Cameraman, a robotic camera system for TV stations. Cameraman was never profitable and the Cameraman division was sold in 2004 for $14M.

ParkerVision announced D2D (Direct2Data), a direct-conversion receiver technology, in 1997. Although Jeff Parker announced the first D2D chips in 1997, no actual product shipped until 2003.  In fact, owing to a complete lack of OEM adoption, the only use of the D2D chip as a component was in the ParkerVision 802.11b SignalMax product. Sales of SignalMax were poor and the product was dropped in 2005. To the best of our knowledge, no other implementations of D2D were ever completed and brought to market. At this point, D2D technology offers no advantage over alternative direct-conversion receiver technologies, which are shipping in large quantities.  Furthermore, to our knowledge, there is no current interest in licensing D2D.

In January 2005, ParkerVision announced D2P (Direct2Power). Jeff Parker called D2P a revolutionary, high-efficiency RF power amplifier (PA) technology for cell phones. In the announcement, Jeff said that ParkerVison had working chips, and that ParkerVision would be able to ship in volume by the end of the 2005. By the end of 2007, ParkerVision was still showing a breadboard with an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) with some analog circuitry in order to demonstrate D2P.  Apparently, ParkerVision did implement some sort of D2P chip in 2005 (implementing the MISO idea from the only issued ParkerVision D2P patent 7,184,723), but the chip had, contrary to Jeff's claims, poor efficiency (as expected - all of the consultants who have looked at the existing D2P patent have said that it would not lead to an efficient PA). This led to a shift in strategy from selling chips (2005) to licensing (2006-), as well as new batch of provisional patent applications (List of D2P Applications)), in an attempt to "patch" the idea of the original patent.

We (and our consultants) are still evaluating the (many) D2P provisionals.  Based on what we have seen so far, the "patches" seem neither practical nor useful. The general idea is to using a signal processor to "predistort" the signal going into a very efficient, but highly nonlinear RF amplifier, with the result being linear. Our analysis indicates that the signal processing requirements lead to a very high power consumption, and, although the approach might linearize the resulting signal, it would not result in a high-efficiency PA. Moreover, the idea of predistortion is a very old idea, and there is extensive prior art. Predistortion is commonly used in base-station power amplifiers, where the high power of the signal processor is small compared to the significant power of the base-station amplifier.

Jeff has stated (as recently as December 3, 2007) that D2P doesn't use a DSP. This is, at best, misleading. All of the D2P provisional applications describe the use of extensive signal processing to predistort the signal. Possibly, Jeff would argue that D2P doesn't need a standalone DSP chip to implement this predistortion. In our view, this is a quibble, in that the function of a digital signal processor must be implemented somewhere in the system - whether it is implemented in the PA chip or in the baseband, the functional logic must exist, and will consume too much power to be practical in a cellular handset, especially at low power levels where the advantages of D2P are claimed to be the strongest. This DSP logic is currently implemented in the FPGA on the breadboard that PRKR is using as a demonstration of D2P, and exhibits extremely high power consumption.

We have talked to many (if not most) of the cellular semiconductor makers who would be potential licensees of the D2P. ParkerVision has shown its D2P (and D2D) technology to most of these companies, including industry leaders such as RFMD, Skyworks, Samsung, and Freescale.To date, every single cellular chip vendor with whom we have spoken, has told us they have no interest in D2P or D2D. Although they are prevented from saying anything publically about D2P (owing to the PRKR NDA), we are confident that none of these companies are going to license PRKR technology.  In fact, contrary to Jeff's repeated statements, a number of them have told Jeff that they don't believe the D2P technology works, and that they have no interest in continuing the discussion.

Finally, please read the following if you're considering shorting ParkerVision.