New Infineon 4G chip possible choice for future iPhone
By Justin Berka | Published: January 19, 2009 - 08:54AM CT
arstechnica.com
Since the inception of the iPhone, Apple has used baseband and radio chips from Infineon. Because of this, keeping an eye on Infineon's product offerings can offer some insight into possible chips for future iPhones, which, in turn, may give us an idea of the device's features. MacNN has detailed the recent announcement of Infineon's SMARTi LU, a single-chip product that supports the 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard, and which is a likely candidate for use in the iPhone.
Verizon will likely be the first carrier to deploy LTE, and that won't happen until late 2009; therefore, the "iPhone 4G" won't be coming any time soon. It's possible that Apple could use the SMARTi LU chip before the networks roll out LTE to a wide audience, though. Infineon's offering combines the baseband and radio transceiver on one chip (which is made using a 65 nanometer process), so the chip is reasonably small and could simplify the internal design of the iPhone. Additionally, the new product is backwards-compatible with the EDGE and HSPA+ standards, the latter of which will be rolled out before LTE. The only real downside seems to be that "SMARTi LU" sounds a bit like a robotic toilet, rather than a smartphone chip.
In terms of a release schedule, the chip won't be ready for production for a while, but Infineon will have samples ready for a trade show in February. As a result, the SMARTi LU probably wouldn't appear in an iPhone until late 2009 or 2010, unless Apple really wanted to get a jump on future standards (which tends not to happen too much). Still, you might want to keep the possibility of a 4G iPhone in 2010 in the back of your mind |
