Lucent readies hands-free
cell-phone kit
By Stephan Ohr
EE Times
(01/03/00, 11:36 a.m. EDT)
LAS VEGAS — Lucent Technologies' Microelectronics Group will
announce its entry into the market for hands-free cell-phone car kits
at this week's Consumer Electronics Show. Based on an
echo-canceling DSP, the car kit eliminates the need for drivers to look
at a cell phone and manually dial while driving.
CellPort Systems (Boulder, Colo.) will use Lucent's digital signal
processor-based chip set in the CellPort universal hands-free system,
scheduled to be introduced in the first quarter. Motorola's Telematics
Communications Group will put the chip set into hands-free phone
systems slated for use in Motorola's embedded telematics (intelligent
transport systems and mobile infotainment systems), which are
expected by 2001.
Lucent (Allentown, Pa.) follows Analog Devices Inc. (Norwood, Mass.)
into the hands-free market, which is being propelled by state laws
requiring that drivers keep their hands off their cell phones and on
their steering wheels. Hawaii, New Jersey, New York and 11 other
states have introduced legislation to implement hands-free cell phone
laws. Internationally, 20 countries, including England, Australia and
Brazil, already require that an auto's cell phone be hands-free.
Hands-down winner
Wireless phones use hands-free functions more often than any other
feature, including message-waiting indicator, last-number redial and
spell dial, according to a 1998 study of approximately 1,000 wireless
phone users by the Yankee Group (Boston). About 45 percent of
wireless subscribers in 1999 purchased or planned to purchase
hands-free kits. That represents almost 13 million units in the United
States alone, said Phillip Redman, associate director of the Yankee
Group's wireless/mobile communications research unit.
But estimates vary on the extent of car kit penetration. Ray Jodoin of
Cahners In-Stat Group (Scottsdale, Ariz.) believes only 19 percent to
23 percent of cell phone users will be consumers of hands-free car
kits. Will Strauss, principal analyst at Forward Concepts (Tempe,
Ariz.) said penetration of car kits may be as low as 5 percent.
Lucent's hands-free product was developed within the Advanced
Communications Technology Center of Bell Laboratories and takes
advantage of the company's extensive experience in acoustics and
speech processing on DSP hardware, said Rob Franzo, who heads the
automotive products group. Lucent had developed a number of
speech systems for use in "cockpits" and "cabins," and it has special
expertise in environmental noise compensation, said Franzo.
In its current incarnation, the car kit provides a full-duplex
speakerphone (with adaptive noise suppression and line echo
cancellation) for use in cars. The DSP also enables memo recording
with a low-bit-rate (6.8 kbits/second) vocoder and a software modem
with simultaneous voice over data at 300 bits/s. Franzo said future
iterations will incorporate Lucent's PhoneMe-based voice recognition
algorithms, which would enable speaker independent
command-and-control functions with a small vocabulary of about 50
words and 95 percent accuracy, he said.
Third-party word-based voice-recognition software such as Philips'
Speech Systems' speaker-dependent software and Lernout &
Hauspie's speaker-independent engines can be ported to the DSP. The
device will also recognize continuous digits without training.
The car kit can use either Lucent's DSP1627 or DSP1629. The
DSP1627 has 32 kwords of ROM and 6 kwords of RAM; the DSP1629
has 48 kwords of ROM and 16 kwords of RAM. Both will produce 100
Mips from a 100-MHz clock and a 2.7-V supply.
Lucent's CSP1027 codec chip is required to perform voice coding. Both
chips support various global wireless standards including the Global
System for Mobile Communications (GSM), code-division multiple
access (CDMA), time-division multiple access (TDMA) and the
Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS).
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