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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kent Rattey who wrote (3519)	10/8/2000 2:15:30 AM
From: engineer	Read Replies (7) \| Respond to of 197204

In 1990, I sat in a room with a rather smug AT&T microelectronics group who I was asking to help me make a DSP core for the new CDMA ASICS. they told me that it would take all their highly talented group so many hours to make a core which would run at 400 mW and run about 30 MHz to perform the CDMA voice coding. they then told me it was not in their marketing plans and that their vast technological group would not get to 30 MHz speeds until sometime projected in 1994 and only then would they be able to help me out. Disapointed that the giant AT&T would not help me out wiht this new technology, I came home and we brainstormed for a week or two. My team then came up wiht a new proprietary DSP core which had a unique architecture, consumed only 30 mW and ran at 10 MHz, was 3 times smaller than the AT&T core would have been, and we ran in an entire technology feature size larger. In todays MSM, this core runs at 13 MHz and draws less than 2 mW!! Hence was born the Qualcomm QDSP core which is still in use today. Out of Necessity, the solution was born. I suggest that Adam Gould go back and dream some more. Perhaps we know why Nokia doesn't have a CDMA chip yet. This is more like the INTC idea of how to build a phone. More MIPS makes it look like you doing something. Try finding a way to do it in less MIPS but more powerfully. Same for video coding. We came up with a way of doing it at Q in 1990 that allowed video coding to be done in less than 150 MIPS and on a single chip. trouble was we had to put all our resources into this new thing called CDMA. But then digital cinema is still around..... (Side note: In 1994-5 AT&T micro targetted Qualcomm to win the DSP core biz back but lost the entire thing once again, as Qualcomm surpassed in volume the entire volume of the DSP 16xx shipments in that year. Q was on their third revision and feature shrink by then.) Also, the gate count of the MSM5100 is probably already about 1.5M gates, and it includes the DSP AND the processor and alot of memory. I would look for 3G to be done in 2M gates or less, and at half the power that he talks about. Perhaps also within the next year. Enjoy....