14 DAY TRIAL // Texas Instruments, the number one supplier of chips for the mobile industry, plans to manufacture a new type of chipset, one that will make the multimedia phones price level to drop significantly so that more people around the world will be able to afford buying one. The new type of chipset will be a single chip version of the TI OMAP-Vox platform that will have its place in the new entry level handsets launched by the phone manufacturers, phones that are still able to offer multimedia features to their users.
The new platform will wear the "eCosto" brand and will be numbered as the 1035, the same "Costo" being already used in TI's 1030 chipset version that is being present in low cost phones being delivered by 15 phone manufacturers worldwide. The future platform will blend the single-chip DRP technology with the multimedia enabled OMAP-Vox chipset and will be made on the 65 nm scale, offering at the same time support for the GSM, EDGE and GPRS standards.
The Texas Instruments officials have presented the new "eCosto" technology, still in development, as a new approach to the process of designing wireless chipsets, an approach that is simplifying the radio frequency processing by applying digital technology through an advanced CMOS process technology.
Remi El-Ouazzane, the general manager of TI's 2.5G business, the Wireless Terminals Business Unit, has declared that "together with its ecosystem of application suite providers, TI is committed to helping its customers differentiate in the highly-competitive wireless market by providing a variety of solutions. TI's applications suite ecosystem provides multiple pre-integrated offerings based on selected superior solutions, resulting in flexible choices and faster time to market with customized, differentiated products."
Also, the Texas Instruments vice president and general manager of Cellular Systems Solutions for the Terminals Business Unit, Alain Mutricy, has said during a Chinese Summit on wireless technology that "as the emerging markets evolve beyond voice-centric, basic multimedia applications, we must support the integration of more advanced multimedia features into our single-chip cell phone solutions".
The future to be launched wireless processing platform will offer the multimedia phone users advanced video capture, digital still camera capability up to 3 megapixel with sub-second shot- to-shot delay, hardware-accelerated Java and 3D graphic processing up to 100-K polygons per second, interactive 2D/3D gaming with graphics comparable to that of portable video consoles and playback and streaming with up to QVGA screen quality at 30 frames per second.
Now, I only wish they would hurry up the process of development because the 1035 platform I am writing about will be launched some time during the early 2008, a pretty long time to wait if you want to get yourself a less costly multimedia enabled phone.