Thanks P. While reading that article may seem like watching sausages being made, it provides a very rare glimpse into how Nokia is morphing its systems to stay ahead of the robust growth of wireless, which is the biggest part of its broadband strategy.
......In the case of third-generation cellular, it is already clear that there will be multiple variants of the standards. It is essential that functions known to be common across the variants can be reused in many different 3G designs.
Further complicating matters, a 3G cellular system has many elements that can be common across different subsystems with very different system design constraints and architectures. For example, components with identical functional descriptions could be used in both basestations and handsets with very different architectural and implementation needs. It clearly helps to remain as independent as possible of the product implementation, including the specifics of the processor and associated bus, until the latest possible stage in the design process.....
......That makes it easy for designers to quickly evaluate the effects of using alternative architectures before spending time implementing any of them. It also makes it easy to use VCs to represent major portions of the design while keeping the them independent of the final processor and bus architecture. The designer can then see the effect on the design as the VCs are mapped to various implementations.....
.......One of the key goals of the Nokia-InterDigital-CoWare pilot project was to prove the usefulness of the SLIF method of documentation and to show how it links with the VCI standard. That was especially important considering that the VCs would be handed off between Nokia and InterDigital and within several different divisions of Nokia, so they had to be understood outside the team that created them.
Nokia is a large multinational with a highly decentralized organizational structure covering over 55,000 employees. It has R&D centers in 14 countries on 4 continents and manufacturing facilities in 10 countries on 3 continents. Their China operations alone is well beyond $1 billion and includes at least 7 joint ventures with Chinese partners. One out of every 3 Nokia employee is involved in R&D in one form or another so it only makes sense to focus intensely on the 3G building blocks at this very early stage of 3G. As MG of IDC indicated at the shareholders' meeting, Nokia has had engineers working at IDC's Melville, NY facility for over 17 months now. That facility, by the way, was one of the original facilities of SCS Mobilecomm which IDC, the former International Mobile Machines, acquired in 1992.
Anyway, one thing that Nokia seems to strive for consistently is a very high degree of commonality in the components -- hardware and software (e.g. Symbian). This discipline seems to involve something like 70-80% at full stride with the remaining 20-30% providing the differentiation that allows them to rapidly respond to the broadest parts of the market, from the high-volume/lower margin to the low-volume/higher margin segments.
Figure that the average cellphone has 400-500 components, only a handful of which are ASICs, and that the industry is expected to start hitting a billion in annual unit shipments (with a very high degree of handset replacement)in 2002 then one can understand why Nokia is winning the battles daily in the supply lines. At some point soon, Nokia will be in a position to buy the annual output of expansion or startup factories still on the planning boards!!!
By the way, Nokia will be at Supercomm this week at Atlanta.
Complementary Fixed Wireless, Wired and Home Networking Solutions Enable a Mobile Information Society
At Nokia Presentation Theatre, top Nokia and customer experts will share their views and news on broadband, including....
- "Protecting and Extending the IP Network," how Nokia is assuring mobile Internet transactions by creating secure, reliable and scaleable network environments.
- Revolutionary new Nokia wireless access solutions for broadband delivery.....
Additional booth demos will include:
- SMS 1800 (remote access node)
- Direct links to a live wireless broadband trial network*
press.nokia.com
* Nokia has several official and unofficial WCDMA trials going on around the world. Which one could this one be? Note the reusuability of the common design components and the differentiation possible with the Nokia/IDC methodology that makes poker strategies possible in the game of time-to-market. |
