J-phone definitely using Qualcomm WCDMA chip in Sanyo phone.
(see bold)
Qualcomm will use two ARMs in battle with TI
By Rick Merritt
EE Times
22 May 2003 (4:03 p.m. GMT)
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SAN JOSE, Calif. — Qualcomm Inc. disclosed plans for next-generation cellular baseband chips to ship in 2004 that integrate two DSPs and two ARM processors as it gears up to battle Texas Instruments for sockets in CDMA phones. The company also claimed it will trump TI in the market for CDMA 1xEV-DV chips by rolling out a part with higher transmission data rates.
At its analyst conference in New York on Thursday (May 22), Qualcomm will officially announce its next-generation series 7000, a family of CDMA baseband processors that integrate an on-chip ARM 11 application processor running at speeds up to 1 GHz. The company will also announce three new members of its existing series 6000 including its first chip to handle the emerging 1x EV-DV standard (1x Evolution for Data and Voice) with transmit data rates that could be as high as 1.6 Mbits/second.
The news comes on the heels of an announcement that TI, ST Microelectronics and Nokia are co-developing their own CDMA chip sets including a 1xEV-DV chip set for 2004.
Analysts said the new Qualcomm chips will keep the company at the leading edge, but increasing competition will help lower CDMA chip prices. They also noted that it could take years for the 1xEV-DV standard to take off.
esponding to the new competition, Johan Lodenius, vice president of marketing and product management at Qualcomm's chip division said, "We have our own low-end products we will price aggressively." TI "will only be ale to sell products to people who are willing to be a year or more behind Nokia," he added.
Lodenius also claimed that Qualcomm is ahead of Nokia in testing and shipping wideband CDMA products. Qualcomm's chip sets power a Sanyo phone that implements the 3GPP version of wideband CDMA for the J-Phone service in Japan.
According to Will Strauss of market watcher Forward Concepts (Tempe, Ariz.) Qualcomm could become the first company to put two DSPs and two ARM chips on one baseband die. To date, Intel has integrated a DSP, Xscale and flash in its Manitoba chip and TI is shipping a two-chip set that has dual DSPs and ARM processors.
The series 7000 chips will have hardware acceleration for several hundred thousand triangles/second using then OpenGL ES standard, up from about 15,000 triangles/sec today. High-end versions of the family will support VGA-resolution video at 30 frames/second. The series will also support new power management capabilities to adjust chip frequencies on the fly.
"We want to enable the market for new kinds of devices that are cost or power prohibitive today," said Lodenius. "With separate application processor and baseband chips it is hard to get both the performance and the low power you need for the mainstream cellular market," he added.
The series 7000 will include a variety of chips that support CDMA 1x and wideband CDMA standards as well as multimode versions that support GPRS. The new baseband processors will be paired with Qualcomm's Radio One zero-IF RF chips.
Separately, Qualcomm is rolling out three new members of its series 6000 CDMA family including the MCM 6700, its first chip to support the 1xEV-DV standard. Lodenius claimed that competitors such as TI are working on chips for the release C version of that standard that transmits data at rates up to 307 Kbits/second. Qualcomm's chip will be based on yet-to-be ratified release D which will have a 1.2 to 1.6 Mbit/s transmit rate, enabling better video conferencing and faster sending of pictures.
The 6700, which will ship sometime next year, will support both the 1xEV-DO standard in use today, primarily in South Korea, and the next-generation EV-DV. "The market launch for DV services is not expected until 2005 or 2006," said Lodenius.
Allen Nogee, a senior analyst at In-Stat/MDR said Qualcomm has been pushing the DO standard and de-emphasizing the DV spec until now. He also noted the faster uplink speeds Qualcomm is promising for its chip could be of marginal interest to users, and the DV standard is still a long way from catching hold among carriers.
"It's debatable how much support there will be for DV," Nogee said.
Strauss of Forward Concepts noted the DV standard uses both packetized data and voice which will require significant new support infrastructure. "DV is going to be tougher to implement than most people realize," he said.
Qualcomm announced two other new members of its series 6000 today to tap other market segments.
The 6275 is the company's first chip to support the high-speed downlink packet architecture (HSDPA) for Mbit/second data transfers over wideband CDMA. It will support CIF resolution video at 30 frames/second, 3-D hardware acceleration at 100,000 triangles/second and CMOS sensor resolutions of up to four Mpixels, Lodenius said.
The chip is also Qualcomm's first to support the Mobile Display Digital Interface, a new fast serial interface for cellphones developed by the VESA group.
Finally, Qualcomm announced a new low-end CDMA chip with data capabilities. The 6141 can download data at rates up to 153 Kbits/s and will ship in the third quarter. It does not support GPRS and is aimed at cost-sensitive markets in Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Qualcomm would not comment on the process technology or prices for any of its chips.
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