Meanwhile, the California based-company, which had set up its operations in India in January 1997, and currently has offices in Delhi and Bangalore, also plans to expand its operations to Mumbai next year. India has been recognised as a focus area by our company, said Mr Kapoor. "We also plan to outsource a lot of software development related to telecom products to Indian companies," he added.

Meanwhile, the $2.1 billion-Conexant plans to target the semi-conductor system launched today at potential cellular handset manufacturers in India.

According to Mr Kapoor, the new system which "offers a complete systems solutions for GSM/GPRS handphone will enable manufacturers to build handphones with small form factors and all the functionalities which is required for the next generation 2.5G/3G wireless phones".

He added, "This is especially relevant for India where currently there is no local handphone manufacturing and there is a rapid growth in the Internet business". The hardware portion of Conexant's solution implements all digital and analog baseband processing, multi-band/multi-slot power amplification, power management and transceiver functions.

According to Mr Kapoor, it uses a low-power, direct-conversion architecture, which eliminates the intermediate-frequency conversion steps of earlier mobile handset solutions. Furthermore, due to its high level of integration, it can reduce external component count by as much as half, as compared to previous generations, he adds.

The solution also incorporates an integrated Web browsing software, which Conexant has implemented using the Pixo wireless-phone OS platform, micro browser, application software and developer tools.

Conexant's multi-slot GSM/GPRS system solution is sampling now, and volume production is scheduled for the third calendar quarter of 2001. It is priced at $28.00 per chip set in quantities of 100,000, said Mr Kapoor.