From the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC)
Chipmakers urged to enable wireless Internet
By Nicolas Mokhoff
EE Times
(02/05/01, 6:45 p.m. EST)
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As one of three plenary speakers, Enoki, managing director of the Gateway Business department at NTT Docomo (Tokyo), struck the theme of this year's conference,
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"We need to develop displays that are able to exhibit high-resolution moving images in real-time as well as high-density memories that would be able to accommodate high-capacity video images, all at acceptable power levels for handheld, cellular devices," said Enoki.
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Enoki reiterated the May scheduled launch of IMT2000, the global standard that integrates the European GSM with the Japanese PDC cellular standards. He allowed that battery and memory challenges remain. IMT2000 baseband signal processing is ten times faster than PDC, which forces chip power to be cut drastically. Also, diverse high-density memory chips are needed to accommodate the diverse volume of data expected to be transmitted.
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Non-volatile memory is essential for downloading media services such as games and directions using maps, Enoki said. And an increasingly serious problem is developing with leakage currents, calling for breakthroughs in both devices and circuitry. While Enoki himself is muffled about internal Docomo developments during the quiet period for the company's upcoming initial public offering, NEC Corp.'s Hisatsune Watanabe, vice president and general manager of System Devices and Fundamental Research at NEC Laboratories (Kanagawa, Japan), shed some light on emerging technologies that will enable next-generation functions in i-Mode terminals. NEC is in competition with Matsushita and Sharp to provide both display technologies and new microarchitectured memories such as MRAMs and FRAMs for future i-Mode terminals, and is working on novel packaging and integration technologies.
"We are applying system-on-glass integration techniques to the TFT logic drivers for color liquid-crystal displays to minimize the power needed to drive the next-generation of fast, high-resolution displays for accommodating live video," said Watanabe. He also mentioned work in the RDRAM area that NEC sees as a possible memory alternative for the next i-Mode terminals.
eet.com
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Another article with possible 3G implications:
Academia, industry divided over RF CMOS
eet.com |
