Qualcomm prepares multi-mode chips in cell-phones arena
By Mark LaPedus
Semiconductor Business News
(02/08/01 12:16 p.m. PST)
SAN FRANCISCO -- At an investment conference here today, the president of Qualcomm Inc. dropped a number of hints about the company's new multi-mode chip set series for third-generation cellular phones. The chip set will soon be offered as an alternative to digital signal processor (DSP) products from Texas Instruments Inc., Motorola Inc., and others.
The new multi-mode chip set will enable handset makers to offer products that run the various--and incompatible--second-generation and 3G digital-cellular standards on the same silicon platform, said Richard Sulpizio, president and chief operating officer of Qualcomm.
San Diego-based Qualcomm plans to formally announce the chip set in the "next couple of weeks," said Sulpizio after his presentation before the Banc of America Securities conference. "You will be hearing a lot more about it," he said in response to questions about the chip set.
The Qualcomm executive said the chip set will be built around a new, high-end DSP architecture, called DSP4. He would not discuss details of that architecture, but industry observers said they believe the product also contains a 32-bit RISC processor core from ARM Ltd.
Qualcomm's new chip set will compete against several products in the market--particularly TI's DSP-based Open Multimedia Applications Platform (OMAP), according to analysts. Supporting a variety of 2G and 3G standards, the OMAP integrates a software infrastructure, an ARM RISC processor, TI's TMS20C55x DSP, and a shared memory architecture on a single piece of silicon.
Like TI's OMAP architecture, Qualcomm's multi-mode chip set will also support various 2G and 3G standards, such as code-division multiple access (CDMA), cdma2000, wide-CDMA (W-CDMA), global system for mobile communications (GSM), among others, said Sulpizio.
"It will run multiple flavors," he said. "It could run cdma2000, W-CDMA, and GSM."
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