Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Tessera Earnings Call

Seeking Alpha publishes Tessera Q2'2009 Earnings Call having some information on Dblur assets acquisition. It starts from the analyst's question:

Raj Seth – Cowen and Company

You mentioned a $9 million purchase of some IP during in the quarter. Could you comment on what it is you are buying...

Mike Anthofer - Tessera EVP and CFO

Yes. So Raj, the acquisitions we made in the quarter were primarily around patents, additional patents. We have the Dblur Asset acquisition in addition to acquiring some patents and we had the balance of an earn-out on a previous acquisition. So in total, on aggregate, that was approximately $9 million.

Then there was a talk on EDOF adoption by Nokia:

Kevin Vassily – Pacific Crest Securities

I think on your last earnings call you mentioned that Nokia was shipping one or two handsets that incorporated enhanced depth of field technology. Do you have an update on that number right now? Is that going up from what you guys can tell?

Hank Nothhaft - Tessera CEO

Yes, it has. It's our – keeping score at our end, we believe seven handsets at the moment including the two that I mentioned on the previous call.
...
We are trying to come up with a better name than extended depth of field because it has so many other capabilities besides just providing a focusing capability.

So for example, in manufacturing it increases the yield of the sensors in a manufacturing application. It's the basis of an ultrafast lens for low lighting situations, provides a lower F-stop and the like. Just as we decided to incorporate it as a feature or a capability and the wafer-level 3 megapixel program that we are – we announced or talked about in today's script. So it's a pretty exciting capability and it's being well received by the market. And in summary, yes, we do expect many additional handset models to be in the market using that technology by year-end.

2 comments:

  1. Is there anything more to EDOF than just a fancy sharpening algorithm? Isn't there an implicit trade-off of far field resolution for near field resolution?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, EDOF is more than just sharpening. Different EDOF approaches have different trade-offs, but they all are more than sharpening.

    ReplyDelete

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