News
Smartphone Market by OEM
Source: BofA, Merrill Lynch
From the perspective of unit shipments, last year (trailing twelve months or TTM) shipments of smartphones were 158.9mn, up 6% YoY, a sharp deceleration from the 22% growth in 2008. However we attribute this to the macro weakness.
Nokia slightly lost share, down from 40% in 2008 to 39% in 2009e and down [...]
Android Surges Among Handset Purchasers
Between September and December 2009, the proportion of future smartphone buyers who planned to purchase an Android-based phone jumped from 6% to 21%.
Alcatel-Lucent introduces new converged radio technology that lets mobile service providers smoothly support any mix of 2G, 3G and 4G/LTE on the same network
Multi-technology radio module can be introduced in more than 700,000 Alcatel-Lucent based stations already installed worldwide, enabling a gradual shift from GSM to W-CDMA and LTE
Paris, February 4, 2010 – Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced the introduction of a new radio module, based on software defined radio (SDR) technology, that gives mobile [...]
mimoOn and Tensilica to Provide Low Power, Small Footprint and Programmable IP Solutions for Mobile Wireless Radios
DUISBURG, GERMANY– February 10, 2010 -mimoOn, a pioneer in LTE software implementations for programmable radio platforms, and Tensilica® Inc., a leader in programmable and efficient IP cores for advanced mobile wireless SOCs (system-on-chips), today announced a partnership to offer best-in-class LTE solutions for mobile wireless radios based on mimoOn’s mi!MobilePHY™ software and Tensilica’s newly announced [...]
mimoOn demonstrates LTE for pico base stations based on Texas Instruments’ DSPs
Duisburg, Germany – 9 February, 2010 – mimoOn, a pioneer in LTE software implementation for programmable radio platforms, announced that it will be demonstrating LTE for pico base stations at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona next week. mimoOn will showcase its advanced LTE PHY implementation running on TI’s DSPs, February 15-18, 2010, in the [...]
mimoOn & CEVA to demonstrate Single-Core, Real-time LTE UE Platform
mimoOn, a pioneer in LTE software implementation for programmable radio platforms, and CEVA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEVA); (LSE: CVA), the leading licensor of silicon intellectual property (SIP) platform solutions and DSP cores, today announced a joint demonstration of a complete LTE UE PHY platform at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The demo will exhibit an end-to-end [...]
mimoOn to demonstrate its advanced low-cost LTE Test Mobile for Digital Dividend at Mobile World Congress 2010
Duisburg, Germany – 4 February, 2010: mimoOn, a pioneer in LTE software implementations for programmable radio platforms, announced it would demonstrate its LTE Test Mobile mi!TestMOBILE™ for the new European Digital Dividend (DD) frequencies at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. The demo can be seen on the mimoOn stand 2B17.
The DD spectrum at [...]
Multimode vector radio dismantles barriers to SDR software portability
My friends at Sigmatix and Octoscope have a nice follow-on EE Times article about Vector SDRs. The original article (mentioning Sandbridge) is here.
As an excerpt: To ensure the cost reduction of SDR platforms via economies of scale, software portability across processors must be achieved. The new generation of SDR, called multimode vector radio (MVR), offers that [...]
Army’s New “Smart Radio” May Revolutionize Communications
Armed with Science reports engineers with the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy are working to build a so-called “universal radio” test-bed this year in Fort Monmouth, N.J. They hope to open the gates of “cognitive radio” development to academia, private industry and other Defense Department organizations.
The Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) is creating [...]
Tensilica Introduces ConnX Atlas Reference Architecture for LTE
Multi-Standard Programmable Radio Platform Also Supports Other Standards Including HSPA+
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – February 8, 2010 -Tensilica, Inc. today introduced its ConnX Atlas LTE (Long-Term Evolution) reference platform, a heterogeneous seven-core reference architecture for a complete multi-standard programmable radio for advanced mobile devices. Atlas is designed to support the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) LTE [...]
Tensilica Introduces Second Generation ConnX BaseBand Engine DSP
Performance Improvements Up to 3x Over ConnX Baseband Engine Introduced in June 2009
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – February 8, 2010 – Tensilica, Inc. today introduced ConnX BBE16, its second generation baseband engine for LTE (long-term evolution) and 4G baseband SOC (system-on-chip) designs. ConnX BBE16’s 16-way MAC (multiply accumulator) architecture is optimized for the most demanding wireless [...]
Octasic Announces Second Generation DSP Core For Cutting-Edge Wireless and Media Gateway Applications
Octasic provides Opus2 DSP Core Development Environment for evaluation by 3G/4G wireless product designers…
MONTREAL, Canada – February 8, 2010 – Octasic Inc., a leading innovator of media processing and wireless solutions, today announced its second generation Opus2 DSP core, a high-performance, ultra-low power, asynchronous DSP architecture optimized for baseband processing and multimedia transcoding. To facilitate [...]
Octasic and Continuous Computing to Demonstrate UMTS Femtocell / Picocell Platform at Mobile World Congress 2010
Smooth Interworking of Trillium® Software with Vocallo BTS Baseband Processor Helps Accelerate Product Development by Small Cell Equipment Providers
MONTREAL, Quebec, Canada and SAN DIEGO – February 8, 2010 – Octasic Inc., a leading innovator of wireless and media processing solutions, and Continuous Computing®, the global provider of hardware and software solutions that address the mobile [...]
Network Performance – or when is a hub better than a switch?
Today is one of those crazy days where my network can not even seem to sustain a voip call. Frankly this really annoys me so I decided to debug my network. Recently I upgraded my home office to a business class cable modem with 5/22Mbps service. Simultaneously with that (yes, unadvised in any network deployment) [...]
2G/3G Patent IP Ownership
Interesting charts on who owns what 2G/3G IP and what they collect in royalties for that IP.
The same report states that Apple pays significantly less royalty for the iPhone. It is suspected to be in the 5.5% range.
Spectral Efficiency
There are no easy or inexpensive solutions to increasing wireless capacity. Like Moore’s Law in semiconductors, Wireless has its own rule of thumb governing the number of bits that can be transmitted over a given amount of wireless spectrum. Mobile phone pioneer Martin Cooper has posited that the number of “conversations” that can be simultaneously [...]
The iHog iPhone
The average iPhone user consumes 5-7x the monthly bandwidth of an average wireless voice subscriber, and 2x+ the amount of an average 3G/smartphone phone user, or 250 – 350 MB. Despite notable usage differences, 3G pricing plans for smartphones in the US have remained relatively fixed price, in contrast to usage based pricing offerings in [...]