Commit Inc., a communications start-up, is reporting that it has produced its first TD-SCDMA chipset to be used in a production-ready telephone for the Chinese market by the end of the year, with China likely to issue third-generation cellular licenses in 2005 once a second generation of TD-SCDMA chipsets is ready.

The six-piece chipset will join those offered by two other companies that are also in various stages of validation and on similar time lines for getting out working cell phones that can be tested with a time-division synchronous code-division multiple-access infrastructure. Earlier this month, Beijing-based T3G Technology Co. Ltd. announced that their chipset would be integrated into a phone within three to four months. Also advancing in the market is Danish telecommunications design group RTX Telecom A/S, which said last summer that it would have a GSM/TD-SCDMA device ready for volume production in phones by mid-2004.

The second-phase testing for 3G in China will start toward the end of March and go through September in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. During the first phase, handsets were reportedly the source of most problems, including temperature spikes, high power consumption and interoperability issues.