Conexant Ships 25 Millionth Device for Digital Cellular Telephones; Conexant is Leading Provider of Power Amplifiers in CDMA Market Segment.

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 11, 1999--Conexant Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:CNXT), formerly Rockwell Semiconductor Systems, Monday announced it has shipped more than 25 million digital cellular power amplifier devices, making it the industry's leading provider in the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) Cellular and Personal Communication Systems (PCS) handset-component market.

According to Dataquest, worldwide CDMA digital handset sales are expected to reach 17.4 million for 1998. With an estimated compound annual growth rate of 43 percent, this market segment is projected to grow to 72.7 million units by 2002.

More than 80 percent of today's CDMA digital cellular and PCS telephone handsets use Conexant's gallium arsenide (GaAs) power amplifiers, including models made by Lucky Goldstar, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung and Sony.

"This quarter, Conexant is shipping in excess of 2 million power amplifiers per month -- a 150 percent increase over last year," said Deepak Mehrotra, vice president, CDMA Products. "Demand continues to accelerate for these chips, and they remain one of the most important determinants of handset size, weight, cost and power consumption.

"As the pre-eminent supplier, we're working hard to innovate key technologies that are quickly enabling smaller, lighter and more power-efficient cell phone handsets."

Power amplifiers are a key component in digital cellular telephones, determining the talk time for the handset. Conexant's devices are based on a 50GHz heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) process, which enables the highly efficient power amplifiers to provide CDMA handsets with talk times 50 to 100 percent over those achieved by analog cellular telephones. The digital CDMA modulation also ensures user privacy and minimizes dropped calls.

First introduced in February 1996, Conexant's family of GaAs power amplifiers target a variety of digital cellular telephone applications including Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) phones; standard single-mode CDMA and TDMA (IS-36) phones; dual-mode cellular CDMA/Advanced Mobile Phone Systems (AMPS) phones; and dual-band, triple-mode phones that operate on Cellular CDMA, PCS CDMA and AMPS networks.

The devices support cellular CDMA for U.S., Korean and Japanese networks, in addition to supporting PCS CDMA for both U.S. and Korean frequency bands.

Conexant Systems is the $1.2 billion company that was created when Rockwell International spun off its semiconductor systems business to shareowners in December 1998.

Conexant is the world's largest independent company focused exclusively on providing semiconductor products for communications electronics. The company aligns its business into five product platforms: Personal Computing, Personal Imaging, Wireless Communications, Digital Infotainment and Network Access.

With more than 30 years of experience in developing analog modem technology, the company draws upon its expertise in mixed-signal processing and communications technology to deliver integrated systems and semiconductor products for a broad range of communications applications.

These products facilitate communications worldwide through wireline voice and data communications networks, cordless and cellular wireless telephony systems, and emerging cable and wireless broadband communications networks.