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Technology Stocks : The New Qualcomm - a S&P500 company -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: quidditch who wrote (217)	7/26/1999 9:27:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13582

Steven - Should it be inferred, then, that you subsribe to the notion, or have seen evidence to the effect, that E will be pushing European carriers to overlay GSM air interface with a CDMA One or 2000 interface in order to begin upgrading and migration toward 3G? Yes, eventually. But I'd be very very surprised to see Ericsson pushing CDMAOne or CDMA-2000 before they have a real product that integrates well with the rest of their product line. My guess is that that point is a dead minimum of 1 year away. In practice, what does the bolded language [but they will probably always be very separate even when on the same chip.] mean. Is the implication that, even though the processor handling the PDA apps is doing so separately from the CDMA processor and DSP, the first microprocessor will be transmitting its PDA apps signals across the interface; if the PDA transmission is "going nuts" because of software glitches or inability of the Yahoo or WK to receive/process/reply over the air interface, does this hold the possibility of crashing the system and wiping out users in the cell? Well, first, you are right that it is impossible to completely avoid the possibility of the PDA processor and apps from screwing up the rest of the cell in some way. (for instance, the example you gave where the PDA processor thinks it needs a permanent connection at 1Mbps and so blocks out many other users.) But, it is possible to minimize the risk. This is done by asking what part of the system does the manufacturer have the least control over and the answer is the PDA apps. (The manufacturer can be pretty sure that the protocol stack software, the hardware, ... will all be relatively untouched by the average user.) Thus it is desirable to isolate the PDA apps software from the cell phone part (DSP, DSP software, ...) to the maximum extent possible (e.g. different operating systems, no common components which might be tied up by an app gone wild,). For those things where communication must happen between the failure prone part and the cell phone part, make sure the cell phone part performs sanity checks to make sure it isn't being asked to do something ridiculous, or that the PDA portion isn't out of control. It is of course possible to do this and still put everything on one chip, but if that is the overall design (one chip) then there is probably a temptation to 'be efficient' and share common components on the chip. To nip this temptation in the bud there could be a management decision to always keep the two pieces on separate chips with separate software. Exactly which philosophy Qualcomm will employ is anybody's guess. Hope this helps. Clark