For three years now, Infineon has been marketing low-cost mobile phone chips that have given new swathes of customers around the globe the chance to use phones for the first time. These innovative chips pack all the key functions onto a tiny piece of silicon. More than 50 million units had been sold by the end of last year, allowing users to make phone calls within GSM mobile networks. The problem was that call charges varied considerably depending on the country and provider.

Today, Internet-based telephony (Voice over IP) is much cheaper. Up to now, however, the sophisticated technology needed for this application was only available on expensive high-end phones known as smart phones. In collaboration with Atheros, the American wireless and wireline broadband technology specialist, Infineon has therefore developed a chip platform that gives users the best of both worlds for the first time.

The low-cost chip from Infineon takes care of all telephony functions in the GSM network, while the Atheros chip kicks in when data packets are used via a wireless LAN (hotspot or WiFi) for voice or data traffic over the Internet. Better still, the whole package is available at an attractive flat rate.

Infineon's contribution to the new GSM/VoIP phones is its X-GOLD 101 single chip, which packs the core functions of a mobile phone - voice processing, radio frequency management, power management, memory and so on - into a footprint of just 8 mm. Atheros adds its 10 mm ROCm (radio-on-chip for mobile) chip. This chip too is optimized to deliver maximum functionality while minimizing power consumption. Compared to conventional solutions, Atheros halves the number of components needed for innovative wireless VoIP communication.

Infineon's initial products will be available to customers as early as the second quarter of this year.