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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (28909)	3/5/1999 1:59:00 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

TI aims to ship 160 million DSPs to cellular phone makers in 1999 By J. Robert Lineback DALLAS -- Texas Instruments Inc. shipped 100 million digital signal processors for cellular phones in 1998, and now it's aiming to deliver more than 160 million DSPs to handset makers this year, according to Gilles Delfassy, vice president of TI's Worldwide Wireless Communications operation. During an annual briefing for analysts and the press here Thursday, TI announced it had shipped $1.3 billion in semiconductor products to the wireless market in 1998--exceeding its goal of reaching the $1 billion mark by the end of the decade. TI now claims it became the world's largest supplier of chips to wireless system manufacturers in 1998, moving up from No.2 in 1997. In 1994, TI was No.7 in wireless semiconductor revenues, shipping less than $115 million of products to the market segment, Delfassy said. To reach further into the wireless market, TI is pushing hard to increase its ability to integrate more functions on a single chip. The Dallas company claims it has created the industry's first single-chip digital baseband function using a new 0.18-micron drawn (0.15-micron L-effective) CMOS technology. The baseband processor contains a C5000 DSP processor core, a microcontroller, analog circuits, memory and other logic functions. Samples of the 0.18-micron device have been shipped to one of TI's biggest DSP customers--Nokia Group in Finland. Using the new process technology, TI is able to produce more than 2,000 of these baseband ICs on an 8-inch wafer, which is about eight times the number using the previous-generation process just six months ago, according to Delfassy. Overall, TI predicted that the number of digital handsets will grow almost 50% to 230 million in 1999 compared to 154 million in 1998. TI told analysts and the press that it expects 400 million digital wireless handsets to be shipped by the industry in 2002, and there seems to be no limit to the growth potential worldwide. "A lot of people have been desperately looking for the famous saturation point [for cellular phones]," Delfassy said. "It's still undefined." In addition the growth of handset units, TI believes the semiconductor content in new digital systems will increase significantly as new features are added to phones. In the existing wireless market, TI said its DSP unit shipments grew 104% to the 100 million mark from 49 million in 1997. In addition to DSP, the company said it shipped 90 million analog baseband ICs in 1998, up 125% from 40 million in 1997, and 32 million power management devices, an increase of 39% from 23 million in 1997. In 1998, TI entered the digital baseband market segment shipping 11 million ICs, according to Delfassy. semibiznews.com