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To: Mike Buckley who wrote (35457)	7/17/1999 8:44:00 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Welcome to the world of the technically challenged = most of us. No, it's not that the DSPs make a dual-purpose chip possible. The inclusion of the DSP in the main ASIC is to achieve handset efficiency. The dual-purpose comes from the power of the chip itself; more being able to fit into a chip and the processing power and speed of it increased, with extra memory. Much like computers have improved from the old 286 puters with 20megabytes of hard disk. Now, my puter has a Pentium something which has lots of really fast circuitry, with 256 megabytes of RAM, as well as a lot of gigabytes of hard disk. So, no, it isn't simply the inclusion of the digital signal processors [DSPs] in the main ASIC which makes the phone a mini-PC. It's simply the sheer grunt and improved design of the ASIC which enables all the high speed functionality. What's exciting is that there is really no limit in sight. The main holdup seems to be simply the inertia of getting it all moving and built into networks and handsets. The physics of it is not the problem. Waiting in the wings is SiGe, SiCGe, photonics [which I noticed is all over the corridors of the Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering in San Diego, with laser laboratories behind many of the doors], MeOH batteries, OFDM [orthogonal frequency division multiplexing]. The sky's the limit. Well, hang on, no it isn't, Globalstar is up there. The limit is, ummm, our limited brainpower, DNA. The new scarce resource. Which has always been the scarce resource, which is obviously why there has been such evolutionary pressure towards an increasing gap between our eyebrows and the top of our heads [bearing in mind that correlation is not causation - meaning, elephants have even further between their eyebrows and the top of their heads -but I hope you know what I mean]. Damn, now Engineer is going to say that is unintelligible drivel. Such is life... Bye for now.. Mqurice

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (35457)	7/17/1999 9:47:00 AM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Mike - Is it the DSP's that help the next gen CDMA ASICs compute? No, not in the sense you mean. DSP's do computations, but a little too specialized (for communications) to be of much utility to you as an end user. As I believe has been said in some of Qualcomm's press releases, the next generation of ASICs will include an ASIC that contains not only a DSP but a normal microprocessor to do PDA type functions. It's the shrinking of microelectronics that allows all of this to be put on one chip. Clark