Foreign system engineering company MCCI showed great interest in rapid development of TD-SCDMA during the last three years and pinned great hope on the China’s home-grown technology.

TD-SCDMA Helps World Move From PC Centric to Mobile Centric

“Everyone should be very impressed with the work that’s been done over the last three years in developing the basic network technology and mobile terminals,” said MCCI’s founder & CEO Terry Moore in an interview with TD-SCDMA Forum.

Moore’s company joined TD-SCDMA Forum as a senior member in 2003 and is engaged in developing and licensing software to cell phone manufacturers.

The TD-SCDMA technology is good, but it will remain an idea without successful marketing and business development, said Moore, adding that product and business development are key to success of this technology.

As HSDPA and other technology come along, the world will move from a PC centric world to a mobile network centric world. The benefit of TD-SCDMA particular in Chinese market will be help in its success, Moore said.

In addition, it has got a much stronger local technology team and the quick development of product to meet the market demands is also crucial, he said.MCCI is working with platform vendors such as Commit and T3G on TD-SCDMA and the company is

interested in working with more partners in TD-SCDMA. “The most important thing is to help all the platforms coordinate their USB implementations, not in terms of the software vendors they choose, but in terms of the standards that they follow, ”said Moore.

MCCI Targets Connectivity

Like many companies in the late 1990s, MCCI did a lot of work in telecommunications, providing USB technology to most of the leading companies for cable modems and ADSL adapters. Then, in late 2001, MCCI started shifting focus to cell phones, first in Japan, then in Korea, and steadily increased market penetration in Europe and Asia as USB-connected cell phones became more and more important.

Moore believed that the most interesting products were going to be developed in Asia, but nobody knew what technologies would be important. “We just felt sure that connecting intelligent products to each other would become a viable area of specialization – other companies would focus on making the basic products, but we would focus on connecting the dots,” he said.

MCCI’s products divide into two groups: software that runs on the cell phone to handle USB-related functions, and software that runs on PCs or embedded system to communicate with the phones.

In its period of growth and maturation, MCCI has maintained its low-key approach to the market. “To be blunt, USB is not the most important feature of cell phones. But when embedded in complex products like cell phones, it’s very important that USB functions well, and that someone has carefully considered all the details of the USB implementation.”

Last year, MCCI did a lot of work with PictBridge, a standard that lets you print directly from a cell phone to a printer without a PC. Immediately after that, the company started the development of their MTP solution, the technology for USB based media players.

MCCI plans to expand its offerings in two directions: more function on handsets and new ways of connecting the handsets. For more function, they’re studying new opportunities in media-player phones. For new connectivity, their emphasis is clearly on wireless connectivity using UWB (Ultra Wideband) radio technology.

The company’s new target technology is WiMedia, a technology using ultra wideband for local mesh networks which allows you to do the wireless USB, and wireless media and wireless blue tooth, etc.

WiMedia will be the first widely-deployed mesh networking technology and it will be very exciting to see how ubiquitous local connectivity changes the market, said Moore.

When being asked when to release their new products, Moore said that there are always practical

problems and too many variables to predict the exact time, but very probably some new products connected to PC will be released in 2007, and products of mobile connection in 2008.

Product Differentiation of MCCI: Scalability and Flexibility

Moore is very confident over MCCI’s products and services. “Our biggest differentiating feature is the scalability and flexibility. Our software is completely portable, which does not depend on any CPU, compiler or USB interface hardware technologies.”

MCCI is putting more functions into its software platform. Everything can be accommodated on the platform through a variety of portability techniques MCCI has been developing in the last ten years. The framework is then a design for complicated devices like cell phones that are intended to do many things.

“We have integrated those functions into existing cell phone platforms. Our software is designed and acceptable for the software platform,” said Moore, adding that it does not interfere at all with the rest of platform functions, which is very important.

On the Windows side, MCCI’s differentiating feature is again it can support multiple functions. The basic support that Microsoft provides for multi-function cell phones is very limited. “We have an approach that not only supports multiple functions, but let you combine special drivers from us for cell phones with Microsoft standard drivers, such as, mass storage, PTP, MTP, etc,” said Moore.

That is very attractive to customers as they don’t need to pay for MCCI special drivers except paying to fill in the PCs functions Microsoft missed.

In addition to its main line products, MCCI has a number of products specialized for testing in manufacturing purposes. “We have a number of USB test labs and there are 6 test labs that are certified,” said Moore, adding that MCCI’s differentiation is that the company has a deep understanding of the technology.

Moore Highly Appreciates TD-SCDMA Forum

In the interview, Moore highly appreciated the work of TD-SCDMA Forum. He said: “TD-SCDMA Forum has been doing a good job, coordinating the activities and getting the world out of the industry to know what’s going on.

“We try to contribute to the development of the TD-SCDMA technology, in hopes that a market will emerge,” said Moore.

“Sometimes we are successful in commercializing the results; but in all cases, we know that our success depends upon the success of the industry as a whole,” he said.

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About MCCI and Mr. Terry Moore
MCCI is a system engineering company based in US that develops and licenses software to cell phone manufacturers. It has grown from 9 people in 1995 to roughly 100 people today. MCCI’s main accomplishments include:

• First Windows drivers for USB modems in 1997
  
• First overseas company to develop drivers for USB cell phones for the FOMA network in Japan
  
• First commercially successful company focused on USB system technology
  
• Prepared the so-called “WMC” USB standard that is used in hundreds of millions of cell phones around the world.
  
• First Independent Software Vendor to certify a USB PictBridge solution for digital-camera cell phones
  
• First Independent Software Vendor to deliver a USB MTP solution for media-player cell phones

MCCI’s PC-side software includes the matching drivers and support software for Windows, Mac OS X, Windows CE, Linux and other operating systems.

MCCI’s founder & CEO, Terry Moore, has been involved with standards-based development since the early 1990s, when he played a leading role in developing the PCMCIA PC Card standards that formed the basis of Compact Flash and the digital still camera memory card industries. In 1995, he founded MCCI to focus on developing software for Asia Pacific manufacturers of consumer electronics.