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

To: foundation who wrote (31249)	1/15/2003 12:58:15 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 196451

It's strikes me as remarkable... at this point... that one might assume credibility. How do you keep the faith? Well....there probably is a certain amount of faith involved ;-), but as usual, it relates more to my belief in engineering skills than the various companies. If Docomo had wanted to lie about their standby times I think they could have done so long before now. The first generation of handsets had standby times of 55 hours. These were bound to increase. These handsets were widely reported to have had a terrible level of integration. This had nothing to do with the standard. There is always a tradeoff between time to market and integration.....the deadlines that Docomo had forced the manufacturers to go with the lower level of integration. I thought that this had been posted here but I just did a search of the archives and couldnt find it....the link also has a couple of pictures that are worth looking at. eet.com Mitsubishi's D-2101V 3G Handset: Too Much, Too Early? By David Carey EE Times December 23, 2002 (2:00 p.m. EST) Recent Articles Under The Hood Archives The silicon-rich Mitsubishi D-2101V wideband-CDMA phone suggests that the complexity-and therefore cost-of W-CDMA handsets will make it tough to achieve high-volume sales anytime soon. With 43 ICs, a total semiconductor die area of 14.6 cm2, 39 modules or odd-form components and more than 775 discrete components, the D-2101V is two to 10 times more complex than entry-level GSM phones. Correspondingly, cost-of-goods-sold estimates for the D-2101V exceed $250-well beyond both GSM and cdma2000 handset counterparts. The Mitsubishi phone, officially launched last March, is a continuation of the NTT Docomo 3G Foma handset line. It is housed in a slightly oversized enclosure, offers a large 132 x 162-pixel color LCD and includes the increasingly de rigueur embedded camera. The camera uses a switchable lens/prism apparatus to support two viewing angles, enabling both "talking head" videoconferencing and still/video capture. To ship all this multimedia data around, the phone supports Docomo's i-Motion video-clip and music transmission service with a claimed maximum downlink speed of 384 kbits/second and maximum uplink speed of 64 kbits/s. Most circuitry is contained on a single high-density circuit board; three subsidiary boards handle display, keypad and headset interfaces. Overall, the main board supports five separate-and sizable-Mitsubishi ASICs spread across three packages. They appear to tackle all digital activity such as still-image capture, video processing, W-CDMA baseband, applications processing and power management. Toshiba, Samsung and Mitsubishi supply an extensive array of memory devices, both SRAM and flash/SRAM stacked chips. A proprietary Analog Devices part and an IBM RF front-end IC constitute the major W-CDMA radio chips. A Rohm audio IC for polyphonic sound completes the major system-LSI content, while Linear Technology and Fairchild devices manage localized power conversion/regulation. One of the more interesting components is the Mitsubishi baseband/ applications processor, consisting of two high-pin-count dice, each adhesive flip-chip bonded on opposing sides of a six-layer build-up BGA package substrate. While this handset appears to be designed with an eye on time-to-market over integration, expect substantial improvements in cost/complexity from all manufacturers that plan to stay in the W-CDMA handset race. The future may be here, but it isn't yet cheap. Indeed, cdma2000 successes have thus far stolen much of W-CDMA-based Foma's thunder in Japan.