14 DAY TRIAL // Broadcom announced recently that its single-chip cellular platform would be included by Samsung in some of its EDGE mobile phones. Broadcom's advanced EDGE platform is built around the BCM21331 single-chip EDGE processor, which is being manufactured under the 65 nanometer (nm) fabrication process and also features integrated cellular radio.
Broadcom also announced that its platform would also include touch-based graphical user interfaces able to provide tactile feedback. In addition, the EDGE solution sports motion sensors, advanced multimedia and extended Bluetooth connectivity, as well as Wi-Fi and GPS capabilities.
“Broadcom is proud to extend our 3G and connectivity relationship with Samsung to include our EDGE products and we look forward to helping bring advanced new handsets to the market,” said Scott Bibaud, senior vice president and general manager of Broadcom's Mobile Platforms Group. “Samsung's rigorous development and quality assurance process has resulted in a solid platform ensuring the advanced features, performance, size, power and cost efficiencies required for its future mobile phones.”
iSuppli, the market research firm, forecasts that we should see a massive growth in the EDGE segment of the mobile phone market during the following years. According to the firm, the segment should grow to over 483 million units in 2012, which would transform EDGE into the largest volume sector. For comparison, in 2008 the number of EDGE mobile phones was of only 308 million units.
Broadcom's BCM21331 EDGE solution comes along with an integrated quad-band EDGE radio frequency (RF) transceiver. The platform is able to offer all of the analog and digital baseband functions, while also delivering built-in support for high-quality image capture, as well as for USB 2.0 OTG (on-the-go) and high-speed secure digital I/O (SDIO) interfaces, not to mention H.264 video recording and playback.