Last week the wireless industry met in Barcelona for the annual Mobile World Congress. I had the good fortune to attend the show and my company Sandbridge was an exhibitor.
The big announcement at the show was Nokia’s license to Broadcom of their modem IP. This legitimizes Broadcom’s cellular offerings on top of an already strong broadband/peripheral capability. Others were less optimistic citing a typical 3-5 years of before production actually ramps.
Meanwhile Nokia has buried the hatchet with Qualcomm and agreed to use their CDMA chips in cell phones. It is amazing how a couple of billion dollars can make friends of former enemies. The first phones will launch mid-2010 based on MSM7xxx and MSM8xxx chipsets targeting wireless broadband.
SDR Announcements
Octasic announced a GSM/EDGE basestation SDR at 80mW/carrier with up to 12 GSM carriers or 6 EDGE carriers. It uses 15 asynchronous cores to achieve this.
Xilinx announced a Virtex-5 FPGA based SDR LTE system.
Agilent, ASTRI, and picoChip demonstrated a TD-LTE Femtocell.
mimoOn announced LTE basestation software for TI’s TMS320TCI648x processors.
mimoOn and Ceteco announced an LTE test UE with 20MHz/100Mbps support based on Sandbridge’s SB3500.
Last but not least, Sandbridge announced Samsung as an LTE platform partner. See also here.
Other Announcements
Nvidia’s announced 1080p playback on a smartphone! On2 announced 1080p/30fps encoding based on the Hantro 8270. Hantro was aquired by On2 in May 2007 for $58M.
ARM teamed up with ST-Ericsson on an SMP dual core Cortex-A9. TI announced 45nm OMAP4 devices would use this multicore platform sampling in 2H09 and production 2H2010. Infineon and InterDigital both lauded the platform.
LG said it would use Intel’s 45nm Atom processor in smartphones in 2010. sub-500mW was given as a competitive power number to compete against ARM solutions.
Qualcomm announced the world’s first complete 3G/LTE chip for smartphones. Rev B, HSPA+, and LTE are supported. Announced more than a year early, the MSM8960 is scheduled to sample mid-2010. It makes one wonder where all the MDM9xxx chips announced in Feb 2007 went.
RFMD announced a 9-band converged multimode front end platform (2G/2.5G/3G/4G).
Verizon selected Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent for LTE infrastructure suppliers.
