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

To: Scott Zion who wrote (3921)	12/26/1999 11:57:00 PM
From: Scott Zion	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

wirelessweek.com 3G Chip Boosts Lucent, Motorola By Brad Smith When it comes to next-generation networks and handsets, you?ve got to have the brains before you can have the brawn. With an eye to enabling the bandwidth-rich wireless technologies of the next decade, a technological partnership between Lucent and Motorola started shipping small quantities of a digital signal processor with ?next generation? written all over it. The SC140 DSP core is the first product coming out of the StarCore joint design center set up by the two manufacturers. The announcement of its availability this month in limited quantity is in line with StarCore?s April announcement it would have the DSP this year. Volume shipping will begin in the first quarter of 2000. The chip will be the fastest of its kind when it hits the market, according to Will Strauss, president of the market research firm Forward Concepts Inc. He sees it as an enabler for future wireless technologies under the 2.5G and 3G labels, which will start appearing in about a year. The SC140 gives Lucent and Motorola a much-needed boost in the chip marketplace, says analyst Dale Ford of Dataquest Inc. The announcement, he says, is a positive sign for both manufacturers, who have committed significant talent and money to the joint effort. ?Clearly, StarCore lies at the heart of the next generation of [semiconductor] products from Lucent and Motorola,? Ford says. Using the joint work of the DSP core, the two manufacturers can design and make their own products. Motorola already has announced its first product based on the core, the MSC8101 aimed at wireline telecommunications. Lucent is expected to announce its own entry, targeted for wireless communications, early in 2000. The StarCore SC140 can power handsets and base stations, as well as be adapted for use in networking servers and for voice over Internet Protocol applications. As carriers start to upgrade their networks for 3G capabilities, the StarCore DSP core will halve the time it takes to develop new products for the arena, according to Thomas Brooks, the center?s marketing director. Brooks says the DSP core sets a new standard in four crucial categories: ease of development, performance, power consumption and code density. The SC140 is a supercharged racehorse when compared to current chips, with more than 30 times the processing speed. Current handset DSPs can carry out about 100 million instructions per second, while the SC140 can do more than 3,000 MIPS. The chip also has low power consumption, operating at the equivalent of 28 milliwatts at 0.9 volts. Since 90 percent of the software code development can be done in the C/C++ language, the design can accelerate a manufacturer?s time to market, Brooks says. Designers can build next-generation products with faster data rates and enhanced end-user features, as well as infrastructure at lower development and silicon costs. What?s most impressive about the SC140 may be that it means that silicon will be shipped for use in 3G networks even before the 3G standards are in field trials. There won?t be any doubt whether the chicken or the egg came first.