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Low-Power Wireless Migrating to Low-Power Design
Posted by: | CommentsLow-Power Wireless is migrating over to Low-Power Design. We’re in the process of moving feature articles to that site, and all new product releases, news stories, videos, and blog posts will appear there instead of here.
Low-Power Design has garnered a lot more traffic than Low-Power Wireless, and we’d like to get our message–which is consistent across both sites–to a much larger audience, which this move will accomplish.
Thank you for your interest in and support of Low-Power Wireless, which we hope and trust will continue on Low-Power Design.
Best regards,
John Donovan, Editor/Publisher
April Wireless Update
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Guest Blog by Will Strauss, President & Principal Analyst, Forward Concepts
Intel Bulks up Again in LTE
In early March, Intel purchased most of the assets of Cairo-based SysDSoft, one of only two licensors of LTE level-2-and-above software stacks. It is unlikely that Intel will allow the entity to continue the licensing business, so that leaves U.K.-based 4M Wireless as the last man standing in the merchant LTE level-2+ stack business. At MWC, we met with SysDSoft and learned that the 120-man Cairo operations were originally a branch of an American company, Ellipsis Digital Systems. The Cairo operation, headed by Dr. Khaled Ismail (a graduate of MIT and veteran of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center), split from Ellipsis in 2002 with two people to provide MAC-layer software for Wi-Fi and design services. The new company then expanded into Bluetooth, WiMAX and RF Design services. SysDSoft claims to have been profitable since 2005.
Until the Intel acquisition, the company offered both LTE UE (terminal) and LTE eNodeB (base station) support for both ARM9 and MIPS24KF platforms. They had earlier licensed their LTE UE stack to Infineon and Beceem (recently acquired by Broadcom), among several others. Rumor has it that the deal went down for about $50 million, much of that based on the value of the patents and IP. Intel hired about 100 of SysDSoft’s engineers and it will be interesting to see how Intel’s new Cairo operations interact with their extensive wireless development center in Haifa. However, it appears that Intel Mobile Communications in Germany (formerly Infineon Technologies) will be the primary interface with the newly acquired Egypt operation.
Intel also Gobbles up Silicon Hive
Netherlands-based Silicon Hive is a Philips Semiconductor spin-out that offers a licensable C-programmable massively parallel architecture for low-power DSP and video processing. At MWC, Intel announced that they were acquiring the company…one that Intel Capital had earlier invested in. Although Silicon Hive has offered a family of communication signal processors based on the architecture, my perception is that the company has been more successful with its image processing and video processing product families. I believe that it is the latter two applications that Intel wants to exploit for use with their new 32nm Medfield implementation of its Atom™ processor family. Medfield is Intel’s hope for finally getting Atom into a real smartphone.
CSR & Zoran Merge
Soon after Mobile World Congress, CSR and Zoran announced that they were merging. The synergies of CSR’s Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and audio with Zoran’s imaging and video processing could be compelling, but as my colleague David Manners of Electronics Weekly pointed out, the synergies expected by the proponents of M&A are rarely as productive as expected.
MediaTek Licenses LTE Baseband DSP from Coresonic
Sweden-based Coresonic AB offers a baseband-specific DSP based on its unique SIMT™ (Single Instruction-flow Multiple Tasks) architecture that uses a task-level pipeline for parallelization. The company provides its technology as an architecture license or as silicon IP cores, and claims smaller size, lower-power consumption and fewer lines of code compared with traditional DSP designs. Just prior to MWC, the company announced that MediaTek had earlier licensed the architecture for a future LTE baseband. The company’s CEO, Johan Lodenius, was formerly a Qualcomm VP of Product Management.
Genasic: New LTE RF Transceiver Coming
U.K.-based Genasic Design Systems Ltd. is an independent RF transceiver supplier that expects to begin sampling its first low-power LTE-capable RF transceiver chip by mid-year. The company’s CEO, Ashok Dhuna, was earlier involved with RF design at Sequans and has built on that experience with his new company. Genasic’s claim to fame is a low-power CMOS approach (in 65nm) with multi-band capability from 698MHz to 2.7GHz. They expect that their 2RX/1TX chip will draw <300 mW, enabling dongles that operate under the 2.5-W limit. But, femtocells and handsets are also in their future planning.
Cloud Radio Picks up a Crowd
In my last newsletter, I mentioned Intel’s approach to cloud computing for aggregating basebands for hundreds of base stations at a central location. Also at MWC, others were touting their approach to centralized baseband operation: Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio active antenna processing drew considerable interest at the Congress, but that is simply one element of the centralized baseband approach they are exploring. Like Intel, IBM Corporation is also researching the cloud baseband approach in China based on its own SDR approach. At CTIA in Orlando last week, Nokia-Siemens Networks unveiled its Liquid Radio approach that allows baseband pools of more than 10Gbps to be shared across 100 cells.
As we mentioned in our last newsletter, the concept of remote radio heads on cellular towers favors the active antenna products by Ubidyne (now competing with Powerwave Technologies and Alca-Lu’s lightRadio) but the need to cram more digital data from the remote radio head on the antenna to a central “cloud” baseband location favors compression algorithm company Samplify Systems. But, another concept involves carrying the RF signals from the remote radio heads over dark fiber to the central location, reducing latency problems inherent in digital processing of the signal. But, since dark fiber is not widely available, it makes sense only in select locations.
From a DSP chip (or DSP-centric SoC) standpoint, Texas Instruments (who is working with NSN on Liquid Radio) assures us that the future centralized baseband approach will not materially affect the market size for such silicon, just where it is installed.
Qualcomm Provides Access to its DSPs
Late last month, Qualcomm announced its OEMs and ISVs will now be able to program their own audio and video codecs using optimized processors and hardware on select versions of Qualcomm’s Mobile Station Modem™ (MSM) chipsets through the new Qualcomm Developer Network DSP Access Program. This allows OEMs to better differentiate their smartphone and tablet devices by augmenting or modifying the Snapdragon™ platform’s multimedia suite with their own features or procure differentiated features directly from ISVs.
A bit of background is helpful. Qualcomm has long employed two of its own DSP cores in its modem chipsets: one as a pure cellular datapump modem (mDSP) and the other optimized as a speech and audio engine (aDSP). Qualcomm is enabling access only to aDSP, since disturbing the modem functionality would negate the cellphone type approvals required in several parts of the globe. In the case of Snapdragon, where the MSM is joined by the multimedia-centric ARM v.7 circuitry, much of the audio/video capability on the MSM becomes redundant and free for other uses, so Qualcomm reserves MIPS and memory for users. It‘s actually a novel way to provide additional or enhanced multimedia functionality without adding more chips to the BOM.
AT&T’s Planned Purchase of T-Mobile: There Will be Blood
AT&T’s parent is the largest private “union shop” in the United States, with some 400,000 of its employees as members of unions. The AT&T Mobility acquisition of T-Mobile will certainly lead to many redundancies (read: layoffs). One might think that the unions would be upset at the prospect of losing some of their members, but the Communications Workers of America, which represents 42,000 AT&T Mobility workers, is salivating at the idea of unionizing T-Mobile’s workforce. One wonders if lack of union representation of its employees enabled T-Mobile to offer cheaper rates than those of AT&T. There may be great operational advantages for AT&T from the accrued cost savings and reduced competition (even largely-non-union Verizon Wireless applauds the reduced competition), but lower cellular subscription prices are not a likely result. There will be blood.
Open Kernel Labs Brags of OKL4 Deployment
OK-Labs has been a pioneer in introducing hypervisors in cellphones, with Qualcomm as its biggest customer. Hypervisors provide Virtual Machines that can enable multiple simultaneous operating systems on a single processor and/or segregate functions and applications. The OK-Labs approach can also provide secure communications for otherwise off-the-shelf cellphones. The company has just announced that its OKL4 Microvisor has been deployed in 1.2 billion mobile devices, primarily attributable to Qualcomm, but ST-Ericsson is also a customer.
Sandbridge: A Tale of Two Acquisitions
In my two previous newsletters, I reported that Sandbridge Technologies Inc., a designer of cellular baseband chip, had been acquired 1) by Qualcomm and 2) by Wuxi DSP Technologies. I obtained information for both stories from sources that I deem reliable. However, in checking with Sandbridge executives, they could not shed any light on the situation, since they are under NDA with both parties. My speculation is that Qualcomm acquired all of the patents and IPR while Wuxi DSP Technologies acquired the people. Wuxi DSP Technologies, in turn, licensed the IPR back from Qualcomm. When the NDAs expire in two years, we’ll know the whole story.
As always, I invite your comments.
MARCH WIRELESS UPDATE
Posted by: | CommentsGuest Blog by Will Strauss, President & Principal Analyst, Forward Concepts
Mobile World Congress: A Success
With double-digit attendee growth to the 60,000 level, MWC’11 has to be labeled as a big success. Moreover, the new products introduced and the overall optimism exhibited bodes well for continued wireless market growth in 2011 and beyond. Of course, many LTE-related products were introduced along with a myriad of new software and service offerings. I’m sure that you have seen many of the news releases, so I’ll only highlight a few things from MWC and some beyond MWC that I think will be of interest to you.
Icera Demo’s Its First Smartphone Socket
In my February newsletter I mentioned Icera’s new cellphone chipset based on its latest baseband and RF technology. At MWC, the company was displaying an HSPA+ i-Mobile smartphone based on Icera’s new chipset. The 21 Mbps Android device is said to be software upgradeable to 28 Mbps. It was real, and I was able to call my wife in the U.S. with it and the voice quality was excellent. Although the company’s cellular chips are in 45 (mostly USB) products, and the company has shipped millions, this is the first handset socket for the company.
Icera has implemented its baseband products based on its DXP software baseband, employing both vector and scalar versions of the DSP core, employing no hardware accelerators…which is said to simplify software upgrades to LTE (a capability they demonstrated at MWC’10). They feel that their baseband design gives them a “massive” cost advantage over Qualcomm, Samsung and Infineon. As the only independent cellular modem company, we fully expect them to be acquired within the next 12 months (maybe by Samsung, who also bid against Intel for Infineon).
Maxim Surprises with first MWC Appearance
Maxim Integrated Products, a powerhouse in analog and mixed-signal chips, had a big booth in the premium Hall 8, directly across from Texas Instruments’ booth (making a market positioning statement?). Maxim claims to be the #1 supplier of power management chips (with TI as their main competitor, followed by Dialog Semiconductor). We’ve seen Maxim power management chips paired with Qualcomm cellphone chips, so they have legs. Maxim also claims to be #1 in touch screen controllers (but Atmel makes the same claim, but it’s clear that they are a significant player). Clearly, the wireless market is a main thrust for the resurgent chip supplier.
MIPS Finally in Cellphones
MIPS Technologies Inc. has been best known as dominating the segment of the RISC market that plugs in the wall, vs. portable products, the market segment dominated by ARM. Ingenic Semiconductor, a Beijing-based client with a MIPS32 architectural license, has fielded an application processor chip for a $100 Android smartphone (paired with a Spreadtrum modem) for the China market. Moreover, new LTE chip players like Sequans and Altair are employing MIPS cores in their products while both 4M Wireless and SySDSoft have demonstrated their L2+ LTE stacks on MIPS32 architecture.
Renesas Reveals LTE Modem at MWC
Renesas Mobile Corporation actually has two LTE modem solutions. Although the company did not provide many details, the first LTE modem (SP2531) is based on a Nokia-originated design which employs a hard-wired DSP augmented by 3 ARM cores (2 dedicated to the modem function). That modem has long been used to test and tune LTE networks. It supports TD-LTE and FDD-LTE cat 3 along with HSPA+ for data rates of up to 42Mbps (DL). It is paired with a 65nm multi-mode LTE transceiver and multi-mode multi-band power amplifier module. The second LTE modem (not announced at MWC) employs DoCoMo technology (presumably, a Fujitsu baseband design based on Tensilica DSP cores). Further details will have to wait for official product announcements.
Intel CID pushes Cloud Cellular Infrastructure
At MWC, Intel’s Communications Infrastructure Division (CID) was pitching its Cloud computing infrastructure that it is developing in conjunction with China Mobile. The basic idea of the proposed centralized radio access network (CRAN) concept is for the RF subsystems to be atop the base station towers, with the digital (I/Q) signals passed via optical cable to the cloud computing center where baseband signal processing will take place for many base stations. Needless to say, this centralized baseband architecture is a radically different approach to current base station deployment, but ties in nicely with Ubidyne’s active antenna array design. If the Intel approach proves to be feasible, I expect that it will be several years before it can garner general industry acceptance.
Nokia & Microsoft Marriage Observations
My first thought was two old ladies helping each other cross the street. Then it occurred to me that it’s something that both companies have to do, even though there will be blood.
Actually, the Microsoft-Nokia deal makes sense to me. First of all, Nokia is in trouble with an overloaded R&D budget and aging software and Microsoft badly needs better traction for Windows Phone 7. Although Windows Phone 7 is late and badly trailing iOS and Android, the early reviews have been generally very good. But Windows Phone 7 is on very few handsets, and Nokia fills the expansion needs for MS. Nokia badly needs a non-Symbian O/S, and adopting Android would make them simply another me-too house. Since MeeGo has not been proven, I think their only quick alternatives were WebOS (now owned by HP) or Windows Phone 7. Microsoft’s Bing browser would “go along for the ride.” Bing is OK, but it could also keep Google, Opera, Safari and others from dominating the mobile browser market. The near-term chip beneficiary of this marriage is Qualcomm, since currently only their chipset supports the DirectX multimedia interface of Windows Phone 7. Other smartphone chipsets tend to use the OpenGL interface. Of course, those other vendors will eventually embrace DirectX. Finally, both Nokia and Microsoft have lots of resources to throw at the problem, and now both finally have realistic roadmaps for their respective flagship wireless products. But, there will be blood.
Not well promoted by Nokia, I use Nokia maps on my (jail-broken) Nokia E71x cellphone from AT&T and it works worldwide, without incurring data charges (unless you want the premium voice directions). I’ve used it extensively in the U.S., U.K., Spain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Turkey and (last week) in Jordan. I actually prefer the Nokia map presentation over the map display that I get on my $400 Garmin car GPS. BTW, my wife and son use iPhones, so I’m not wedded to Nokia.
Sandbridge Acquired by Wuxi DSP Technologies
Sandbridge Technologies Inc., a designer of cellular baseband chips has been acquired by Wuxi DSP Technologies, based in Wuxi (pronounced “wu-hsi”) in Jiangsu Province, just West of Shanghai. The original Sandbridge office in the U.S. has become the company’s R&D center, called Optimum Semiconductor Technologies: www.optimumsemi-tech.com . The company’s SB3500 chip features the Sandblaster® DSP for execution of baseband operations in software, including the physical layer. It has a programmable RF interface, with the capability to capture raw data at 240 M samples/sec. It includes interfaces to LCD, keypad, USIM, SmartCard, Audio codec, IrDA, plus emerging ‘critical’ features such as add-on memory cards, camera interface, and USB.
As a side note, Wuxi is the city where most of China’s original analog TV receiver chips were fabricated, back in the early ’80s. Historically, the city is noted as the favored location for the Emperor’s concubines, since the women there are said to be very beautiful (I didn’t check this out, since it was only a train stop for my visit).
Smartphone Definition gets Fuzzy
In the past, smartphones were distinguished from the lesser “feature phones” by the fact that they employed a high-level operating system, like Symbian, Windows Mobile, iOS or, most recently, Android. And smartphones were clearly more expensive than feature phones that could provide at least limited multimedia capabilities. However, now with $100 (un-subsidized) phones running Android due out this year, the old definition based on the high-level O/S no longer seems appropriate. The net effect is that the feature phone market is disappearing while the smartphone market now addresses a wider spectrum of handsets. Moreover, the lowest-end smartphones are not 3G-capable. Clearly, the $100 smartphone (one is running at 400MHz) will not be able to reach the performance level (2×1.2GHz) of a $600 smartphone, so I solicit your opinions on new nomenclature for distinguishing “expensive” from “cheap” smartphones. And, like the poor, even cheaper budget phones will always be with us.
We interviewed many more companies at MWC, so some observations will have to wait for our next newsletter.
As always, I invite your comments.
February Wireless Update
Posted by: | CommentsGuest Blog by Will Strauss, President & Principal Analyst, Forward Concepts
Tensilica Claims #1 LTE IP spot
With the scramble to get chips into the LTE (a.k.a. 4G) market, most cellular baseband chip companies are licensing their DSP cores from one of two major suppliers: CEVA, Inc. and Tensilica, Inc. CEVA clearly has a significant IP market lead in 2G and 3G shipments, worldwide, claiming its IP in 36% of worldwide cellular baseband shipments in the third quarter of 2010. However, both companies are fighting for LTE design-ins. Tensilica claims to have the #1 position in LTE design-ins for cellular and lists the following companies as licensees for LTE (note, however, that CEVA has also licensed its DSP cores for LTE basebands at some of these same companies):
- Fujitsu
- Huawei
- Infineon (through Blue Wonder Communications)
- MediaTek (through DoCoMo)
- NEC
- Panasonic
- Renesas
- Wavesat
Tensilica promises to introduce new, more powerful cores for both terminals and infrastructure at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in another two weeks, and at least one of Tensilica’s LTE infrastructure baseband licensees (see below) will be announcing products there, too. Since LTE baseband shipments are currently a miniscule segment of the cellphone market, there’s still room for competition.
Egypt-based SySDSoft Claims 3 of the Top 10 Chip Houses for its LTE Software Stack
Cairo-based SySDSoft, Inc. claims to have licensed its UE protocol stack for LTE to 7 wireless chip companies, including 3 of the top 10 houses. SySDSoft will have a stand at MWC where they will demonstrate what they claim as “the world’s highest performance for the UE stack, achieving CAT5 even for the smallest packet sizes.”
Their principal LTE PHY stack competitor, mimoOn GmbH, and LTE layer 2&3 stack competitor, 4M Wireless, will also have stands at MWC. Note that all of these LTE protocol stack suppliers are prime candidates for acquisition in 2011.
DesignArt Networks Challenges Wireless Infrastructure Chip Houses
This month, Israel-based DesignArt Networks will be launching its DAN3800 SoC that is a complete multi-sector, multi-gigabit LTE Advanced Baseband chip. Based on multi-core Tensilica DSPs and multi-core ARM9s, the DAN3800 is claimed to have a fraction of the power consumption of competing chip solutions of similar throughputs. According to the company’s CTO, “Consuming only 8 Watts, the DAN3800 delivers multiples in performance of currently available silicon solutions – powering an entire 4-sector LTE Advanced Macro BTS for the delivery of up to 1.2 Gbps of raw 4G data capacity – all with just one single DAN3800 Baseband SoC.” This low power allows the company to address ambient-cooled pico basestation solutions on telephone poles as well as (through multiple chips) full macro base stations. The company’s investors include Motorola Ventures, Carmel Ventures, and Magma Venture Partners. So, DesignArt now joins the elite group of macro base station baseband chip suppliers, namely, Texas Instruments, Freescale, LSI, Mindspeed, and (soon) Intel.
Intel Mobile Communications Emerges
This week, Intel announced that it has completed its acquisition of Infineon Technologies‘ cellular chip business. At the upcoming MWC in Barcelona, Intel Mobile Communications will have a stand, presumably replacing the former Infineon Technologies stand. It is presently unclear as to how independent the newly-acquired German operations will be.
Icera Offers its First HSPA+ Handset Chip
Last week, Icera announced its new Espresso®450 chip which comprises Icera’s latest baseband and RF technology and delivers quad-band HSPA+ up to 28Mbps together with full quad-band 2G/3G voice support functions. The company claims that the two-chip set is in the industry’s smallest footprint, a tiny 700mm2. Icera has been shipping its chipsets in high volume to the data dongle market, but this is the company’s first offering aimed at smartphones, providing a complete radio interface layer for the Android operating system and full validated voice technology. Clearly, they want to be an application processor’s best friend. Samples of first phones using Espresso®450 will be showing at MWC and first products are expected to ship in late 2011.
Freescale Announces first Quad-Core Cortex-A9 Chip
In case you missed the early January announcement, Freescale Semiconductor became the first company to announce a quad-core Cortex-A9 chip. The chip is the top-of-the line of the company’s new i.MX6 family of Cortex-A9 based chips, following Solo- and Dual-core members, all to be available with up to 1.2 GHz operation. Neon DSP and 3D Graphics are part of all family members, along with L2 caches starting at 256kB up to 2MB at the high end. Freescale envisions applications like monochrome eBooks at the low end of the family (where the current i.MX products are the market leader), with color eBooks served by dual-core versions (along with basic business tablets and medical products) and the quad-cores serving media tablets, netbooks and luxury infotainment products.
Clearly, Freescale is investing heavily in its multimedia product line, which will provide balance to the company’s traditional automotive and communications infrastructure emphasis.
New Industry Alliance Kicks off at MWC
One of the problems of LTE is that products for LTE must also support 3G and 2G over several frequency bands. The transmitter solution for efficient operation has been to install as many as 8 power amplifiers in a handset, each designed to be efficient for a given frequency band. A technique that is said to increase power efficiency (and thus lower power consumption) involves envelope tracking of the input power to the power amplifier, also resulting in fewer power amplifiers in a handset. The new OpenET Alliance (www.open-et.org) has the goal of standardizing envelope interface specifications both for handsets and infrastructure applications. The OpenET Alliance is a non-profit organization, and it is being initially backed by Nujira Ltd., the primary supplier of envelope tracking solutions. The kickoff begins at MWC as spelled out on the website.
How Will Consumers Benefit from the Smart Grid?
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George Arnold from NIST gave a talk with that title over lunch today at the Smart Energy Summit in Austin. The benefits of the Smart Grid may be obvious at NIST but they’re a lot less so to consumers. In fact as Arnold noted wryly at the beginning, “Neither consumers nor utilities are quite sure why we’re doing this.” As the National Coordinator for Smart Grid Interoperability at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), it’s Arnold’s job to get the word out, which this talk definitely did.
The basic structure of the electric grid today is not much different than it was 100 years ago, other than the fact that it supplies AC rather than DC. Reasons for modernizing the grid include reducing costs; using more renewables; improving reliability; and supporting electric vehicle recharging.
The arguments on the cost side are compelling. Half of all U.S. coal plants are over 40 years old, and the cost of upgrading or replacing them is estimated at $560 billion by the year 2030. Smart Grid technology can reduce both peak and average electrical usage, reducing the required investment. There’s also considerable leeway for conservation. In the United States per capita annual electricity usage is 13,000 kWh. In Japan the per capita usage is 7900 kWh. By providing feedback to consumers on their usage patterns and enabling them to shift loads to nonpeak – and therefore lower cost – hours, smart grids provide the feedback loop to consumers both enabling and incentivizing them to conserve electricity.
The US has nowhere to go but up in the use of renewable energy sources. The vast majority of our electricity comes from coal-fired power plants. According to the Department of Energy renewables account for only 8.4% of US electrical generation, with Hydro contributing 5.95%, wind only 0.83% and solar even less.
On the reliability issue: the average U.S. utility customer experiences 125 min. of power outages per year; the average Japanese consumer only has to put up with that for 16 min. per year. The estimated cost of these power outages to the US economy according to the department energy is approximately $80 billion per year.
Turning to the demand side, where does the power go? Residential use accounts for 37%, commercial usage is 36% and industrial applications account for the remaining 27%. On the residential side 17% of your electricity goes to air conditioning, 15% to lights, 9% to heating and the balance to other devices. Getting your kids to turn off the lights will help, but only so much.
Arnold spent some time discussing smart appliances. Smart appliances will need home control systems in order to store your preferences for them; it won’t be up to the electric utility to determine when and which appliances you run. This event was heavily supported by numerous players in the smart appliance and home control markets, including the HomePlug Powerline Alliance, the HomeGrid Forum, the Z-Wave Alliance, the Wi-Fi Alliance and numerous semiconductor, system and utility providers. The stakeholders came to share ideas and hear what NIST had to say.
As well they might. As Arnold asked rhetorically, “With a dozen different communications interfaces, how do you do a national Smart Grid?” Good question. Right now just about every RF protocol you’ve heard of – and some you may not have – is vying to be part of the smart grid. Lacking any kind of standardization, and with plenty of money invested in proprietary solutions, utilities are understandably reluctant to move forward with Smart Grid implementations, and consumers are at least as confused.
NIST has now finished reviewing the various protocols and is now passing that information back to industry to work out standards. In Arnold’s words, “Things are about to become very contentious and argumentative” as standards are hashed out. As Bismarck once remarked, “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” The same certainly applies to electronics standards.
There actually is real progress being made, and we’ll report on that shortly. Meanwhile don’t despair, the Smart Grid really is happening. It’s just not going to be happening next week.
January Wireless Update
Posted by: | CommentsGuest Blog by Will Strauss, President & Principal Analyst, Forward Concepts
4G is Now Officially Meaningless
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has loosened its definition of 4G to include LTE, WiMAX, and HSPA+. Clearly, this was caving in to the claims of the operators who are now plastering 4G on anything that has higher data speeds than 3G. So, when LTE-Advanced arrives, you can bet that the carriers will be calling it 5G…assuming that they haven’t begun to incorporate that terminology with their next half-step up from “4G.”
Windows for ARM-based Tablets?
At CES this week, rumor is that Microsoft plans to announce a “full” version of Windows for ARM-based portable devices like tablets, etc. Not to be confused with Windows Phone 7 (WP7), which is relegated to cellphones, the new version will boost the opportunities for tablets, netbooks and other portable devices competing for a piece of the Apple-dominated portable market…or is it the Intel-dominated netbook market?
Intel Gets Tighter with Via Telecom
You may recall that on Sept. 27th I recommended that Intel purchase Via Telecom as an adjunct to its still-pending purchase of Infineon’s cellular business. Well, Intel and Via Telecom have announced a new working relationship through Intel’s Wind River subsidiary. Codenamed
Kunlun, the joint project is said to help bring low-cost Android smartphones to China-based CDMA handset makers. Taking a page from MediaTek’s playbook, the ultimate aim of Kunlun appears to be providing a complete PCB assembly platform to make it easy for the zero-R&D-budget Chinese whitebox cellphone makers to wrap plastic around it for a virtually complete cellphone solution.
This is exactly what Intel needs to do for a quick entry to the CDMA cellphone market after completion of the Infineon acquisition, and we believe this move is an initial step before Intel actually makes a bid for Via Telecom (if it hasn’t already).
BTW: Kunlun is the name of a legendary mountain in China.
So, What’s Holding up Intel’s Infineon Acquisition?
One rumor coming out of Europe is that Samsung was also a bidder for Infineon’s cellphone business, and with a higher bid price. However, the rumor is that Intel promised Infineon and the German government that there would be no personnel layoffs for at least two years and other considerations favorable to the country. Hammering this out with a government entity and awaiting EU approval is one possibility for the acquisition delay.
Fujitsu Intros Wideband 3G/LTE Transceiver
Fujitsu Semiconductor Wireless Products, Inc., based in Tempe Arizona, was formerly part of Freescale Semiconductor (and earlier part of Motorola). The 150-man team is well-seasoned in the cellphone transceiver market, and is now offering the first commercially ready SAW-less 3G and LTE single-chip, multi-mode cellphone transceiver. The MB86L10A RF transceiver covers 700 MHz to 2.7 GHz and eliminates the need for external LNAs. Supporting DigRF/MIPI interfaces, the MB86L10A offers simultaneous support of both 3G and 4G modems which allows the MB86L10A to be paired with one or two baseband processor chips as needed. So, until there is a single 2G/3G/LTE baseband chip available, this is a great RF transceiver solution for most emerging “LTE” modem/handset vendors.
Infineon has long been the leader in the merchant market for 3G transceivers, but that part of Infineon is soon to be part of Intel. If Infineon ceases serving that segment, Fujitsu will become “the prettiest girl at the party.”
Will Synopsys Compete with ARM and MIPS?
With its acquisition of Virage Logic last year, Synopsys now has the ARC RISC/DSP technology that was acquired by Virage Logic just a few months earlier. Whether Synopsys will continue to pursue direct competition against ARM, MIPS, and others or will simply incorporate the IP into its custom design portfolio is not yet clear.
Sanyo Semiconductor Acquired by ON Semiconductor
In its 8th company acquisition, Phoenix-based ON Semiconductor is acquiring Japan-based Sanyo Semiconductor for a figure stated as about 50% of Sanyo’s annual revenues. Clearly, Sanyo wanted out of the semi business and ON Semi adds MCUs, motor controllers, audio tuners, inverters and other products to its ever-expanding product portfolio. Through the acquisition, ON Semi increases its market presence in Japan and improves its position in the automotive and consumer markets.
Freescale Announces First Quad ARM Cortex-A9 Chip
Yesterday, Freescale became the first company to announce a 4-core Cortex-A9 chip. The new chip is part of the company’s new i.MX 6 family of multimedia processors. Naturally, solo-core and dual-core members of the family are also available. One should remember that Freescale’s earlier i.MX family dominates the eReader market, including Amazon’s Kindle. Freescale will be introducing even more products at CES and continues revenue growth; so its future is looking brighter now.
NSN Acquisition of Motorola’s Infrastructure Business Delayed
Although it was announced back in July that Nokia-Siemens Networks (NSN) would be acquiring Motorola’s cellular infrastructure business for $1.2 billion cash, the deal is still awaiting approval by China’s Anti-Monopoly Bureau of the Ministry of Commerce. The deal is now expected to close in Q1 of this year.
Nokia’s acquisition of Siemens’ infrastructure business is still a work in progress, so it will be interesting to see how smooth the integration of Motorola’s 7,500 employees in the U.S., China and India will be.
Mobile World Congress Scheduling
We’ve begun filling out our calendars for the upcoming MWC in Barcelona (Feb. 14-17). Satish Menon, Forward Concepts’ Senior Wireless Analyst, and I will be attending, so let me know if your company has new wireless chips or cellular software (no Apps, please) that you’d like to introduce to us at the Congress.
Shameless Plug
Our newest market study, “Cellular Handset Chip Market’10″ has achieved strong market acceptance. Published in November, the new 548-page study provides strategies and insight for the many chip types serving the cellphone market and their vendors. Although the study covers the popular digital basebands, application processors and RF transceivers in great depth, it also covers virtually all of the other chips in cellphones, too, with individual forecasts of each type. For details, check our website at: www.fwdconcepts.com/Cellchip10.
In Search of 500 MHz for Wireless Broadband
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Everyone likes high-speed wireless access for their mobile devices. Unfortunately while the demand seems limitless, the supply is highly limited. Almost all available spectrum from microwaves on down is already allocated and increasingly crowded.
Despite this inconvenient truth–or rather because of it–on June 28, 2010 President Obama signed a Presidential Memorandum that directed the Secretary of Commerce, through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), to collaborate with the FCC to produce a ten-year plan and timetable for making available 500 megahertz of Federal and non-Federal spectrum suitable for wireless broadband use, while taking into account the need to ensure there is no loss of existing critical government capabilities and the need for appropriate enforcement mechanisms and authorities.
The NTIA and DOC have subsequently release two reports that include:
- A Ten-Year Plan and Timetable to make 500 megahertz of Federal and non-Federal
spectrum available for wireless broadband use; and - Fast Track Evaluation of the 1675-1710 MHz, 1755-1780 MHz, 3500-3650 MHz, and
4200-4220 MHz and 4380-4400 MHz bands.
The NTIA has identified 2,200 megahertz of spectrum to evaluate for wireless broadband opportunities, including the four fast-track bands, as candidate bands for review. The report provides a roadmap for identifying wireless spectrum assigned to both Federal and non-Federal users that can be allocated for wireless broadband, as well as for using all spectrum more efficiently.
A detailed fact sheet spelling out the highlights of the reports is available here. The bottom line is that it should be no problem to find a spare 500 MHz of useful spectrum out of the proposed 2,200 MHz…after the FCC holds more meetings to hear from and address the concerns of a wide range of stakeholders.
That won’t be easy and it won’t happen overnight. But at some point it will happen. When it does, expect to see an outpouring of applications to take advantage of the newly opened spectrum. When the FCC opened up the ISM bands to unlicensed devices it gave rise to new wireless technologies that created multi-billion dollar industries. I’d expect nothing less the next time around.
December Wireless Update
Posted by: | CommentsGuest Blog by Will Strauss, President & Principal Analyst, Forward Concepts
Renesas Mobile Corp. Arrives
As noted last month, today Renesas makes its best pitch to move out of the confines of the Japan-centric wireless market and becoming a worldwide force through the formation of its new subsidiary, Renesas Mobile Corp. (RMC). Nokia’s wireless business assets transferred to the new company yesterday and operations RMC begin now. The Nokia wireless modem assets (GSM/WCDMA/HSPA/LTE, ranked #1 worldwide) are now merged with Renesas application processor (they rank themselves as #1 WW), baseband processor (ranked as #1 in Japan) and RF ICs (they rank as in the top 5, WW) for a complete mobile platform.
Headquartered in Tokyo, the company has ambitious plans to be the in the “Top 3″ global mobile platform vendor rankings by 2015. RMC has plans beyond cellphones; with a roadmap that includes any “convergence device” that requires wireless connectivity. Oh yes, they are committed to MeeGo as their favored smartphone O/S. More will be revealed in February at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where RMC plans a major LTE presence. We will be watching closely to see how the next 12 months shake out for this global merger of East and West.
Why is Intel Playing Foundry?
Intel will create chips based on its 22-nanometer technology for Achronix Semiconductor, Achronix announced last month. A number of industry articles have raised the question as to why Intel would open up its “family jewel box” to others. I believe that it’s less mysterious than most imagine.
Jim Bixby, then CEO of Brooktree Corp., a San Diego startup that was later bought by Qualcomm (and bringing Sanjay Jha on board), once said to me: “Having your own fab is like having a swimming pool full of sharks…that you have to feed every day.” I suspect that Intel wants to make sure that its top-of-the-line process line is fed every day, even when demand for its own chips slows down at times.
High-end FPGAs demand the best fab they can get. That’s why some FPGAs have sold for over $4,000 per chip. Besides FPGAs, what other high-volume devices need the highest performance possible? Of course, the other FPGA houses (Altera & Xilinx) are already pushing the traditional foundries (TSMC & Globalfoundries) for their best processes, but newcomer Tabula might be a prospect, too. Then, there’s AMD, but I think that competitors are not invited to the party. No doubt, graphics processing units (GPUs) would also benefit, but I don’t think Intel is inclined to helpNvidia do better. It is notable that Intel has embraced Altera’s Arria II GX FPGAs in the same package with its newest E600C Atom processor, billed as the “first configurable Atom-based processor.” It’s also worth noting (follow in the next section) that the Altera FPGA in the E600C contains dedicated DSP blocks (232 18×18-bit multipliers). Intel’s response to our query revealed that it is not fabbing the Altera FPGAs.
Maybe DSPs would also be a fit for the foundry service. After all, Texas Instruments‘ latest 8-core DSP for cellular base stations (and no doubt soon in media gateways and video transcoders) is fabbed in TSMC’s 40 nm process. And a 22nm version is surely on their roadmap for the next (12-core?) DSP. But, check out my next section below, which throws water on that prospect. Then there are the multicore processing houses like Cavium andNetLogic Microsystems with their MIPS Technologies-based products for cellular gateways, assuming that MIPS architectures can scale down to 22nm. If the Achronix arrangement works well, we can expect Intel to take in a few more high-end chips from others.
But, maybe low-end chips too. Intel will also be fabbing chips for Lilliputian Systems for their Silicon Power Cell power generator that is fueled by recyclable butane cartridges. These chips will be fabbed in Intel’s older Hudson MA facility (formerly DEC’s fab). Intel is also an investor in the Wilmington MA company. Likely, Intel has other foundry relationships that we don’t know about.
Intel Licenses CEVA’s Top DSP Core
In early November, CEVA announced (without further comment) that Intel was licensing its top-of-the-line CEVA-XC DSP core. Since Infineon (soon to be acquired by Intel) had announced last quarter that it had licensed CEVA’s TeakLite III core, one wonders what’s up. Infineon, and earlier as Siemens Semiconductor, has long been a major licensee of CEVA cores for its cellphone baseband chips, including those that have been in all versions of the iPhone…at least until now. My speculation is that Infineon had licensed the TeakLite III cores for an upcoming multi-DSP LTE baseband chip. So why is Intel licensing the more powerful CEVA-XC core? There are two possibilities: 1) Intel wants to ensure that its (distant-) future “LTE Advanced” cellphone basebands will have enough horsepower, or 2) Intel is looking at entering the base station market, for which the XC core family is well-suited.
Considering that Intel’s X86 products are already #2 in communications infrastructure CPUs, following #1 Freescale’s CorIQ (PowerPC) product line, it may not be too much of a reach to take in more of the significant cellular base station baseband chip market, currently dominated by Texas Instruments, Freescale and LSI Corp. Since it is premature for Intel to be directing Infineon’s future designs. I believe that my #2 assumption is the correct one. This view is reinforced by Intel’s online promotional video at Intel Architecture Video Watch out TI, Freescale and LSI: Intel is on the move again.
Nvidia’s Tegra 2 Jumps into the Cellphone Applications Processor Market
Nvidia’s Tegra 2 application processor will be making a big splash at January’s CES conference. Nvidia has already landed Tegra 2 orders from PC vendors ASUSTeK Computer, Acer and Toshiba and now the word on the street is that Tegra 2 will be in upcoming cellphone models from Motorola, HTC and LG. Moreover, tablets and pads based on Tegra 2 will be rolling out from Motorola and LG, and perhaps others. Although the Tegra 2 is based on dual-processor ARM Cortex-A9s, Nvidia’s own massively parallel graphics engine is said to enable better graphics at lower power consumption that of competing application processors from Qualcomm (Scorpion) and Texas Instruments (OMAP4). But, we’re anxious to see the real power draw specs.
All Signs Point to Verizon‘s iPhone
With unverified reports coming out of Taiwan of TSMC’s ramp-up of Qualcomm’s chips for CDMA-based iPhones and continuous reports out of Chinaindicating such iPhones are in production there, it is pretty clear that the rumors of the Verizon iPhone are on the mark. The Wall Street Journal reports that Pegatron, the contract manufacturing subsidiary of ASUSTeK (itself the largest manufacturer of PC motherboards) is manufacturing the Verizon iPhones. Moreover, AT&T is now actively promoting alternative smartphones…before the end of its exclusive agreement with Apple. So, the only mystery left is when.
Verizon promises to launch its “4G LTE” service this month, and proclaims that the U.S. network is the “most advanced 4G network in the world.” The first video commercial clearly indicates it’s a USB dongle implementation, so it’s unlikely that Verizon’s iPhone will be a “4G LTE” device. An “LTE news conference” is scheduled for today at Noon EST (Dec. 1st), so details are forthcoming.
Imagination Technologies buys HelloSoft
The leader in mobile graphics IP, U.K.-based Imagination Technologies, announced that it was purchasing DSP/VoIP experts HelloSoft for about $47 million, structured over time. However, some have questioned the rationale for Imagination’s move. Imagination’s president stated that “HelloSoft’s software enabled voice and video exchanges over the Internet in wireless networks such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX and the next generation mobile network LTE… It is very complementary to our graphics and multimedia engine in bringing end-to-end media over Internet Protocol.” We agree that it is complementary to the company’s best known products, but we have a different take on the acquisition. U.S. headquartered HelloSoft brings its Hyderabad (India) DSP software expertise and Asian business connections to Imagination.
Although Imagination is best known for its POWERVR graphics technology, the company’s lesser-known 32-bit, multithreaded, META DSP cores can instantly benefit from HelloSoft’s significant DSP and VoIP capabilities. Besides, the acquired India operation provides a solid base for Imagination to expand its R&D operations there. And, as LTE evolves into and all-IP network, the HelloSoft acquisition will strengthen Imagination’s hand in the evolving (IMS) wireless/wireline IP interconnect technology.
Huawei buys Belgian LTE design house
M&A rolls on. We couldn’t possibly list all of the semiconductor mergers and acquisitions that have occurred this quarter, but in wireless it’s worth noting that China’s Huawei has acquired Belgium-based LTE modem house M4S NV. M4S is an IMEC spinoff that employs IMEC’s ADRES-based DSP for SDR radio. M4S became a subsidiary of USB dongle and data card supplier Option NV and the acquisition cost Huawei approximately EUR 8 million. Option was once #1 in the European USB dongle/data card market…until Huawei displaced them with cheaper products. But then ZTE displaced Huawei with even cheaper products. I think we will see this same lower-pricing scenario in other wireless markets.
Shameless Plug
Our newest market study, “Cellular Handset Chip Market ’10” has achieved strong market acceptance, since there is no other that is so detailed. The new 548-page study provides strategies and insight for the many chip types serving the cellphone market and their vendors. Although the study covers the popular digital basebands, application processors and RF transceivers in great depth, it covers virtually all of the other chips in cellphones, too, with individual forecasts of each type and vendor market shares for most of them. For details, check our website at: www.fwdconcepts.com/Cellchip10
As always, I invite your comments.
M&A Season in Full Swing
Posted by: | CommentsGuest Blog by Will Strauss, President & Principal Analyst, Forward Concepts
The semiconductor market is up some 35% this year and a number of chip companies are sitting on piles of cash as they look for more meaningful (and dependable) direction from Washington and Wall Street. So, rather than commit to hiring lots of people for the jobs that have either disappeared or have gone overseas, they are committing their resources to mergers and acquisitions (M&As). After all, many companies view such actions as simply another investment in R&D. Since the stock market is not yet friendly to high-tech IPOs, many emerging chip houses (who have developed products, but don’t yet have profitable shipment volumes) see M&A as the current alternative. Check out some of the recent examples below:
Broadcom’s Beceem & Percello Acquisitions add LTE and Femtocells to its Portfolio
In mid-October, Broadcom announced its acquisition/merger of WiMAX house Beceem. Broadcom has been looking at ways to add LTE to its current 2.5G/3G cellphone chip line without having to start from scratch. And like all of the other WiMAX chip vendors, Beceem has been morphing into an LTE modem house, and Broadcom needs to field an LTE cellphone modem within the next year or so. Announcement of the Percello acquisition came in late October.
Beceem had planned on an IPO, but it was built on a strong WiMAX story, and WiMAX is clearly a market that has reached its peak and the company does not yet have an LTE product. Consequently, the M&A route was the best way to move forward. Word on the street is that VCs (including Intel) had invested about $200 million in Beceem, so the $316 price presents a nice return for the VCs.
Israel-based Percello is a major supplier of UMTS femtocell basebands, and Ubiquisys is its biggest customer. Ubiquisys, in turn, is the primary femtocell supplier to AT&T in the U.S., SoftBank in Japan and SFR in France. The acquisition price was said to be $86 million; not a bad return on the estimated $20 million of investor backing. So, Broadcom instantly becomes a leader in the femtocell market and Ubiquisys also claims a budding LTE capability, further enhancing Broadcom’s wireless portfolio.
BTW, Beceem earlier announced that it had licensed CEVA DSP core technology for its LTE product development, and Broadcom is already a CEVA licensee for both 2.5G and 3G modems. Presumably, this will help to ease the technology migration between the two companies. I don’t expect Broadcom LTE modems to be announced before late 2011 or early 2012.
Qualcomm Acquires Sandbridge
Don’t expect to see a press release on it (since it doesn’t represent a material change to their finances), but Qualcomm has purchased 4G modem chip house Sandbridge Technologies Inc. Sandbridge had a multicore DSP design that was a departure from anything else on the market, and it appeared to be powerful enough for LTE. However, the company failed to get a significant “socket” for the chip, even though Samsung was one of the backers. Rumor has it that that the purchase was primarily for patents and IP, with no plans to carry the product line forward. The transaction price is rumored to be about $55 million.
Infineon Acquires Blue Wonder Communications
In effect, Intel bulks up more in LTE cellular as soon-to-be-acquired Infineon buys Dresden-based Blue Wonder Communications. Blue Wonder has been employing multiple Tensilica DSP cores for its LTE modem, with the 4G software stacks from UK-based 4M Wireless and Cairo-based SySDSoft. Mergers and acquisitions certainly aren’t confined to the U.S.
PMC-Sierra Acquires Wintegra
M&A continuing…PMC-Sierra, a chip company that bills itself as “The premier Internet infrastructure semiconductor solution provider” has acquired Texas and Israel-based Wintegra, Inc. for a reported $240 million. Wintegra had filed for an IPO last may, hoping to raise $115 million. The acquisition was clearly the more attractive route. Wintegra makes communication processor chips employed in cellular base stations and backhaul infrastructure. Expect many more such acquisitions from cash-rich chip houses.
Renesas Mobile Corporation to Absorb Nokia Chip Line
Renesas Electronics Corp. is creating a new subsidiary to absorb its newly-acquired Nokia cellphone modem chip business and its current Mobile Multimedia SoC Division. Effective December 1st, Renesas Mobile Corporation will be a separate entity that will serve to “enable Renesas Electronics to offer more robust products targeting expanding markets worldwide for LTE/HSPA+ devices, including markets for mobile phones and car navigation systems.” As of November 30, 2010, Renesas Electronics will inherit the personnel from Nokia’s wireless modem business located in Finland, India, Britain, Denmark, China, and other countries. New local subsidiaries of Renesas Mobile will be established in Finland, India, and China, and the employees will be transferred to these local subsidiaries. In addition to these regions, Renesas Design France S.A.S, which is currently Renesas Electronics’ SoC design company, also will become a subsidiary of Renesas Mobile. As a result, more than 75 percent of the 1,800 total employees of Renesas Mobile will be based outside Japan. Renesas Mobile will ship its first sample of modem chipset solutions incorporating LTE/HSPA+ modems in Q4 FY2010 to customers worldwide, including Nokia, which has already agreed to adopt Renesas Mobile’s offering into their products. I’m impressed with the organizational move, since the wireless business is a significantly different from the company’s mainstream MCU business.
How do the Application Processor Houses counter Snapdragon?
Currently, Texas Instruments leads in 3G cellphone application processor shipments with their OMAP3/4 product line. But, Qualcomm is nipping at their heels with its Snapdragon communication processor which incorporates the Scorpion application processor on the same die with the cellular modem. And Snapdragon has been getting the most “ink” in the press of late. Since TI has exited the cellular modem business (albeit still shipping products to Nokia through 2011), they don’t have a “com-processor” offering to counter the 3G cellular modem sockets that Qualcomm now dominates. So the question arises, “Should TI buy its way back into the cellular modem market?” That move could allow TI to have a product to compete directly with Snapdragon. Besides, we predict that Com-Processors will be almost three-quarters of the Application Processor shipments in 2014, otherwise the baseband-less houses will be addressing only a quarter of the market. Don’t forget, Intel bought its way back into the (previously-abandoned) cellphone baseband market by acquiring Infineon.
Then, there’s Nvidia in a similar situation, with a worthy application processor with their Tegra 1/2 product line, but no 3G modem of its own to pair with. Both companies are big enough to buy one of the few remaining modem houses, should they decide to take that route. However since Infineon has been taken out of play by Intel, that leaves only a few acquisition possibilities; preferably ones with a 3G/LTE roadmap. Likely, the front runner would be Icera Semiconductor, but that company is anticipating an IPO early next year that would likely value them close to $1billion. Of course, smaller WiMAX and LTE-only houses (who don’t currently have a 3G play) are cheaper possibilities, but would require a heavier R&D investment and an additional year or two to have a competitive product. Such possibilities include Altair, Sequans and Wavesat. As mentioned above, next year will see a changing cellular landscape through M&As and IPOs.
Wavesat Claims Radical LTE Multifunction Chip in the Works
WiMAX/XGP chip vendor Wavesat is currently sampling its OD9010 LTE Cat 3 FDD/LDD modem chip (which is also 802.16e Wave 2-compliant). That chip is in field trials, but the more interesting item is the fact that the company plans to field a multifunction cellphone modem next year that not only provides LTE capability but also “handles all known 3G protocols.” We take that to also mean both CDMA-1xEV-DO Rev A and HSPA+ on the same chip. Wavesat claims to have been through 9 generations of OFDM silicon, to-date. But, their future plans are pretty ambitious for a company that’s a fraction of the size of the big guys. But, we’ll be watching.
Only Altair, Qualcomm & Samsung shipping LTE modems?
The current LTE user equipment market is 99% data dongles (USB modems) and only Altair, Qualcomm and Samsung are currently shipping to that market in quantity. It should be noted, however, that Sequans TD-LTE/SAE modems have been trialed in Shanghai’s World Expo Park and the company is planning on introducing a combo WiMAX/LTE modem in 2011. ST-Ericsson also displayed its LTE modems at the Shanghai World Expo, as part of Quanta Computer’s TD-LTE tablet. The LTE modem market is currently in the hundreds of thousands of units annually, but we predict will kick into the single-digit millions in late 2011.
NXP Bridges MCU & DSP with New Dual-Core ARM Cortex M0/M4 chips
This week, NXP Semiconductors introduced its new LPC4000 family of processor chips that bring the advantage of developing DSP and MCU applications within a single architecture and development environment. The heart of the product line is the ARM Cortex-M4 which provides DSP features such as single-cycle MAC, single instruction multiple data (SIMD) techniques, saturating arithmetic, and a floating point unit. The Cortex-M0 subsystem processor offloads many of the data movement and I/O handling duties that can drain the bandwidth of the Cortex-M4 core. This allows the Cortex-M4 to concentrate fully on crunching numbers for digital DSP applications such as high-performance audio or sophisticated motor control. Our surveys have indicated that traditional DSPs dedicate some 50% of more of their processor cycles to non-DSP functions, so the approach makes a lot of sense. NXP had earlier introduced a Cortex-M3 based product and now the company has committed its future processor roadmap exclusively to ARM-based products.
Shameless Plug
It has been months in the making, but our newest market study, “Cellular Handset Chip Market’10” is now available. The new 548-page study provides strategies and insight for the many chip types serving the cellphone market and their vendors. The chart here illustrates the many devices covered in the study. The chips that are the substance of cellphones constitute almost a $50 billion market this year. The most expensive component of cellphones is the LCD display, and we cover them and popular touch screen controllers as well as more modem-specific chips like digital basebands and communication processors that include integral application processors. The study report discusses the many vendor changes in the 2010 market, brought about largely through acquisitions and mergers (and divestitures) that will shift market shares over time. Qualcomm continues as the cellular handset chip market leader, followed by Texas Instruments and ST-Ericsson. Next in rank is Infineon, now part of Intel, which continues its significant market presence. The report ranks the top 30 chip vendors overall and provides vendor market shares for each key chip type (and even by air interface). We believe that this is the most comprehensive study of all chips that serve the cellular handset market. Details are at: http://fwdconcepts.com/Cellchip10
Meet PandaBoard
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Do you dream of developing mobile apps and letting those little puppies quietly top up your bank account while you keep your day job? If you have $174 to spare, this could be your time.
TI has just introduced the PandaBoard, a low-cost, open OMAP 4 processor-based mobile software development platform. If you’re used to TI’s BeagleBoard, you’ll be right at home with the PandaBoard, which is considerably more powerful. The OMAP 4 processor contains two ARM Cortex-A9 cores each running at 1 GHz, giving you the SMP processing power of most desktops in a small form factor, mobile package; the board contains more I/O connections and wireless protocols than you’re ever likely to need–but you never know.
You can read all about it here or sit back, drink your coffee and let TI’s engineers walk you through the PandaBoard’s features and specs in the following video. I’ve already ordered mine.
