Chinese language Electronic Design News, breaks the news that UMC has won the socket for the fabrication of Infineon-designed 3G baseband chip for the next generation iPhone. Current generation iPhone baseband chip is also designed by Infineon, but manufactured by TSMC.
Archive for April, 2008
CSR demos Bluetooth ULP chips for medical market
Published April 15, 2008 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
CSR, the leading supplier of Bluetooth chips, demoed their Bluetooth ULP chip today at the Continua Health Alliance medical conference in Luxemborg. The chip is a dual-mode Bluetooth chip, which can operate in the Ultra-Low Power (ULP) mode as well as the regular v2.1 Bluetooth standard. This follows TI’s announcement a few months ago, at CTIA 2008, of their own entry to the Bluetooth ULP market. TI’s chip, the Navilink 6.0, combines assisted GPS, FM radio, as well as the dual-mode Bluetooth transceiver.
For those who is not familiar with Bluetooth ULP, the standard was initially named WiBree, and was solely sponsored by Nokia. On July 2008, the Bluetooth SIG, the standard body responsible for maintaining the Bluetooth standard, agrees to incorporate Wibree into the Bluetooth standard under the banner Bluetooth ULP. Nokia positioned WiBree technology as a complement to Bluetooth, where WiBree can furnish application where low power comes first, and data rate second.
It is interesting to note, whereas TI chose to make the splash in a big wireless conference like the CTIA, CSR chose to unveil their product in a medical conference. This is not surprising since health-related gadgets, like a pedometer or a heart-rate monitor have been the poster-child for WiBree.
Telegent Systems: back to the future with mobile TV
Published April 14, 2008 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
Talk about exploiting market transients; Telegent Systems offer chips that would enable cell phones to receive analog televisions. Say what ??? In simple terms, the premise is as follows: after many years in the hype-machine, (digital) mobile TV has not yet taken off yet. And they believe it’s not going to take off any time soon in the future either. Current numbers indicate that market penetration in established market in Europe won’t even reach 10% by 2010. This is due to many reasons, ranging from getting a standard together, getting a good program line-up, as well as establishing a good business model for the operators. All this is happening while analog TV is still going strong, especially in developing countries such as China, India and Latin America. Yes, digital TV will be eventually turned off, but for most part of the world, this won’t happen until the next decade. And best of all, analog TV is free !! No business model to create, no negotiations with carriers necessary.
The company realizes that offering mobile chips to receive analog TV is not a sustainable business model in the long term. But if you look at the next five years or so; it is quite apparent that digital mobile TV would never get the level of coverage you get with current analog TV (remember how long 3G was supposedly was already ‘around the corner’ ?). So while all the other players are investing a lot of money into building DVB-H chips for market that is not even yet established, Tellegent are already putting more than 5 million chips on cell phones as of early 2008. Talk about exploiting market transient, eh ??
Technically speaking, analog TV standard such as PAL and NTSC is created decades ago, way before the concept of mobile reception is even a consideration. As such, there is absolutely no provisions for mobile reception. Telegent gets around this by exploiting the fact that you really don’t need a very high level of fidelity for your 2 inch cell phone screen.
Friday brings news that ST and NXP will merge their wireless business. NXP is the semiconductor spin-off of Phillips. ST Micro is perhaps the only semiconductor company in Europe which still holds on to the IDM model.
While the announcement was touted as a formation of a new joint venture between the two companies; it looks like ST is actually buying NXP’s wireless business. Initially NXP will take 20% stake of the new joint venture; however the agreement also contains exit clauses on which NXP can choose to leave the joint venture in 3 years time. Furthermore, ST is actually paying NXP a sizable amount, $1.55 billion to be exact, in order to get 80% control of the new venture.
Hey !! Welcome to my new blog. As the title suggest this blog will be dedicated to current events in the semiconductor industry. This blog will attempt to cover industry trends, new innovations in the industry, future products in the pipeline, as well as the ups and downs of the industry players. We will try to cover how the semiconductor industry has helped create new technologies and applications, as well as where the industry would like to make its next push.
I hope you will enjoy this blog !
