A leading US integrated circuit (IC) manufacturer announced here Wednesday that it will fuel the already fierce competition in market of the third-generation (3G) mobile telecommunication technologies.

Jerald Fishman, president and chief executive officer of AnalogDevices, Inc. (ADI), said, "We and our Chinese partners Datang and Huawei are aimed at providing the market with mature products for 3G networks."

In the past couple of years, Fishman said, ADI developed chipsets, branded SoftFone, for TD-SCDMA and WCDMA, two 3G cellular standards adopted in China and Europe, respectively.

In shifting its strategic expansion priority, ADI, one of the world's fastest-growing suppliers of advanced digital signal processing, radio frequency and micro-electromechanical systems integrated circuits, kicked off its Asia headquarters in Shanghai,which are responsible for ADI marketing and post-sale service in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Taipei.

Meanwhile, the company has transferred some key research and development tasks from the United States and other developed countries to Beijing and Shanghai.

"China is the fastest-growing IC market in the world," Fishman said, citing that 15 percent of ADI revenues in 2004 fiscal year, or 2.63 billion US dollars, came from China.

"China becomes the second-largest consumer of IC products," Fishman said, "ADI will focus on IC products for medical equipment, industrial automation, automobile and telecommunication."

The US company retains more than 60,000 business customers throughout the world. "We plan to get 25,000 new Chinese customers in coming five years, and they will make us keep the current annual growth rate of above 20 percent.

Howard Cheng, ADI vice president for Greater China operations, said, "We are not just taking China as a manufacturing base, we'll also deploy our R&D centers here."