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Technology Stocks : ARM Holdings (Advanced RISC Machines) plc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jackmore who wrote (220)	10/13/1999 1:35:00 AM
From: Gary L. Kepler	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 912

Lots of future demand for ARM. See below: Qualcomm preps wideband-CDMA chip set By Peter Clarke EE Times (10/11/99, 3:40 p.m. EDT) GENEVA — Qualcomm Inc. is preparing a dedicated chip set that will support Wideband-CDMA. The company is also in discussions concerning intellectual property that would allow the company to include GSM circuits within chip sets for multi-mode handsets. At Telecom 99, Qualcomm (San Diego) announced its intention to develop the MSM5100 chip set to support the 1X and 3X forms of multi-carrier (MC) CDMA, and to develop the MSM5200 chip set with support for direct sequence Wideband-CDMA . Wideband-CDMA, otherwise known the Direct Sequence form of the frequency domain duplex third-generation (3G) mobile communications, is likely to be deployed in Europe and Japan as an alternative to the multi-carrier form of CDMA, also known as cdma2000, which is also supported by Qualcomm. The MSM5100 is an upgrade to the MSM5000, which only supports the 1X mode. The MSM5000 is set to begin fields trials in South Korea in the first quarter of 2000, with commercial production to follow those trials. Qualcomm was at the center of a row over intellectual property earlier this year concerning patents held by Qualcomm and L.M. Ericsson. The dispute, which risked derailing standards-setting procedures, was settled when both companies agreed to share their intellectual property with others using the standards, and with Ericsson agreeing to buy Qualcomm's infrastructure business. Qualcomm executives gave few details and no time scales for the MSM5100 and MSM5200. Johan Lodenius, vice president of marketing and product management for CDMA technologies at Qualcomm, said the chips will be complete RF-to-baseband solutions accompanied by appropriate suites of software. The baseband chips will be based on ARM processor cores and Qualcomm DSP circuits, he said. The MSM5000 made use of an ARM7 core, but Lodenius declined to say whether the MSM5100 or MSM5200, which will be aimed at 3G terminals, would use more advanced cores from ARM. "We will use future versions of the ARM. We have agreements with ARM. We will use ARM9 and ARM10 when it is advantageous to us," Lodenius said. "We make heavy use of the DSP circuits in our solutions and we can off-load a lot of the work there," he said. "For example, speaker-independent voice recognition can be supported in the DSP without much impact on the processor." Lodenius stressed that the MSM5100 and MSM5200 were being designed to a common platform. "It's not a question of when we put the chips out. It's a question of what the market wants," he said. CDMA 1X terminals are due to be deployed towards the end of next year, creating a demand for MSM5000 silicon. MSM5100 and MSM5200 could be expected to follow later. Lodenius would not say whether Qualcomm will produce versions of the chip sets re-optimized for use in basestations. "We will remain in basestations. But we can do things differently in basestations because the constraints are different. So basestation versions may evolve differently," he said. Also at Telecom 99, Qualcomm said it was looking at integrating GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) circuitry into future chip sets to better support the design of multi-mode terminals. "We have to work with GSM," said Irwin Jacobs, chairman and chief executive officer of Qualcomm. "We've been having such discussions. It's mainly a matter of intellectual property and timing rather than technology," he said.

To: jackmore who wrote (220)	10/20/1999 5:12:00 PM
From: jackmore	Respond to of 912

More news. Samsung licenses DSP Group cores By David Lammers EE Times (10/19/99, 2:35 p.m. EDT) SAN JOSE, Calif. ? The ASIC division of Samsung Electronics has completed a licensing agreement with DSP Group (Santa Clara, Calif.) to expand its library of communications cores in order to heighten its competitiveness in the communications business. The agreement follows a recent deal wherein Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. (TAEC) licensed a suite of cores from Sican Microelectronics Corp. (Palo Alto, Calif.), also in the communications field. Samsung is beefing up its library of intellectual property (IP) cores in preparation for the 0.18-micron logic generation, which is to go into full swing early next year. Designs are being qualified now, said Farzad Zarrinfar, director of ASIC marketing at Samsung Semiconductor (San Jose, Calif.). Samsung has licensed the TeakLite and Teak DSP cores from the DSP Group. TeakLite is available now for use in Samsung's 0.25-micron process, while the enhanced Teak core will be aimed at the forthcoming 0.18-micron process. Zarrinfar said Samsung's strategy is to bring the Teak cores and its ARM9 processor core to the voice-over-Internet Protocol marketplace. "The ARM9 will become the communications controller that works in between Teak and embedded DRAM," he said. Samsung has been producing ASICs with embedded DRAM since 1996, but the low cost of discrete DRAM kept many designers from moving to eDRAM. Recently, as DRAM prices have increased, more ASIC designers are choosing to use eDRAM, the company said. For example, in printers some customers now choose to embed 4 to 16 Mbytes of DRAM rather than risk dependence on a dwindling supply of discrete DRAM at those trailing-edge densities, Zarrinfar said. Toshiba is also emphasizing embedded DRAM as a value-added feature for its designs. About one-fourth of the new ASIC designs at TAEC include embedded DRAM, according to Peter Richmond, director of system-level integration business development at TAEC. eetimes.com