Handset Trends Could Mean Trouble for DSPs
Online staff -- 9/20/2005
Electronic News
The future of the mobile phone promises new functions and sophisticated features, and these will affect the future of digital signal processors as well.
That’s according to a new report from ABI Research, which has identified four major trends for handsets and DSPs.
First, cellular protocols will transition to 3G and 4G standards. In addition, advanced multimedia such as video conferencing, 3D gaming and graphics and mobile television will become phone features. Cell phones will also get new wireless network capabilities such as Wi-Fi, GPS, Ultra Wideband, and WiMAX. And companies will work to improve link margins and communications quality.
These trends mean changes ahead for DSPs, according to Alan Varghese, ABI’s principal analyst for semiconductor research. He sees two pathways – one evolutionary and the other disruptive and revolutionary.
“The evolutionary path involves increasing reliance on hardware accelerators and coprocessors to offload the DSP’s work,” he said, in a statement. “But this approach might run into problems: it is going to be too complex to support all the hardware required for all the protocols mentioned above. A hardware-centric architecture also precludes quick adaptations to new requirements.”
The company sees revolutionary promise in software defined architectures, which it says are finally becoming viable in the handset. “Considering the mobile phone DSP is approximately a $5 billion industry, current market leaders may need to start looking over their shoulders,” Varghese said. |
