Activities at recent wireless industry events such as the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas, make it clear that operators are accelerating deployment of 4G WiMAX and LTE networks to meet the growing demand for higher-performance mobile broadband services. Smartphones that can access these new 4G networks (such as the HTC EVO) are the key to subscriber adoption, driving the need for a new generation of mobile phone chip sets.
New designs must be adaptable to the plethora of existing 3G standards while simultaneously supporting the progressive evolution to various implementations of 4G. At the 2010 International Solid States Circuits Conference, where the most significant advances in chip design are presented, designers showed that they are indeed meeting the challenges of next-generation smartphone requirements.
In my recently published report on Next-Generation ICs for Mobile Devices, the most significant of these innovations in wireless chip design are reviewed and analyzed for the impact they will have on the key building blocks in future handsets.
Some of the highlights:
* Programmable RF/Analog Front-End (RF/AFE) circuits that will enable 3G/4G global roaming.
* Low-cost 4G baseband processors to accelerate implementation of LTE smartphones.
* Software-Defined Radios that are configurable for LTE, WiMAX, WiFi and mobile TV.
* Powerful application processors that will lower power consumption, increase performance and integrate heterogeneous processor cores, including H.264 codecs and 3D/2D graphics engines.
* Multi-band mobile-TV SoCs combining support for ISDB, T-DMB, and DVB standards.
* Audio output circuits to deliver lower-noise, higher fidelity to drive headphones.
My analysis of the leading-edge integrated circuit designs under development at wireless semiconductor companies worldwide, finds that advances being made in higher performance, re-configurable architectures will lead to a new generation of smartphones that will drive more rapid adoption of 3G and 4G mobile broadband services.
Companies covered in this report:
* Advanced Circuit Pursuit
* Analog Devices
* ARM
* Broadcom
* Intel
* Marvell
* Nokia
* NXP Semiconductors
* Qualcomm
* Renesas
* Samsung
* ST-Ericsson
* Texas Instruments
* Toshiba
The report is titled Next-Generation ICs for Mobile Devices - Innovations in Wireless Design. A free excerpt can be downloaded at www.digdia.com.
For more information contact me at Michael.Demler@digdia.com
Related Articles:
The Samsung Galaxy-S & HTC EVO at CTIA Day-1
Wireless technology in the spotlight on Day 1 at ISSCC
Clearwire's Silicon Valley WiMAX Innovation Network
Verizon Wireless LTE demo at CES
The theme for this morning's keynote panel at CTIA Wireless was a "focus on how mobile technology is transforming business, media and the economy".
- Steve Largent: former Seattle Seahawk, now President & CEO of CTIA
- Roundtable Moderator: Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, Anchor and Reporter - CNBC
- James Cameron, Academy Award-winning Director (Titanic)and of course.. Avatar
- Aneesh Chopra, Assistant to the President and CTO, U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy
- Biz Stone, co-founder -Twitter
There is way too much for me to cover here (it's getting late), but I think most would agree without much argument that these are the two most significant new smartphone announcements of the show.
The pictures above are of the much-anticipated Sprint 4G smartphone. This is the first phone in the U.S. to support both 3G & 4G (WiMAX) operation. The device is made by HTC, and is called HTC EVO 4G.
Some of the specs:
- 3G/4G
- Android 2.1
- 1GHz Snapdragon processor
- Serves as a mobile WiFi hotspot for up to 8 devices
- 4.3" display
- HDMI video output
- Digital compass, proxiity & motion sensors
- Two cameras, front & back. Back camera 8 Mpixel
This is the Samsung Galaxy-S. I hope that the clarity and vivid colors of the 4" "super" AMOLED display shows through here.Other features:
- 4" super AMOLED
- 1GHz Samsung processor
- 5 Mpixel camera
- 3G HSPA
Till next time.
-Mike
Bluestreak is a company that provides a platform for encoding video for mobile Flash applications. They were showing off how well Flash works on this Android smartphone. They also had an example of the HTC FLO-TV device, but with no FLO signal at the Showstoppers event, there was no point in taking a picture (or showing it for that matter).
This isn't the first appearance for this Kempler & Strauss wristwatch cell phone, but if you're an old (make that longtime) Dick Tracy fan like me.. it's kinda cool. It operates from a touch screen, or with remote control functions on the Bluetooth earpiece.
IGUGU TV is a box that lets you stream video from your PC, or the internet, to your TV over an 802.11n WiFI connection. The remote control in the foreground provides on screen navigation of the menus. For internet video they were using a Sprint 4G WiMAX hotspot to download video to the set-top box.Perhaps not as photogenic, but I also had good discussions at ShowStoppers with these companies:
- DeviceAnywhere: enables developers to remotely test their smartphone (or feature phone) apps on physical devices. For more on DeviceAnywhere see my report "The Android Invasion".
- picoChip is building chipsets for the growing Femtocell market.
- Aviat (formerly Harris Stratex) Networks provides microwave backhaul solutions for some of the world's largest deployments of WiMAX.
I received an email from AT&T last Friday, with the subject "Great News - Coverage in San Jose, CA just got better". Apparently they installed a new cell tower a little over a mile from my house, and they wanted to make sure I knew about it. Their timing was uncanny, because I had just missed a call from my wife about fifteen minutes earlier, apparently because I lost signal moving around in my house. (It's a small house!)
Now that I had this great news, I had to perform a test to see just how fast "The nation's fastest 3G network" is in my neighborhood.
I started out while I was waiting in line to check out from the local Orchard Supply store. Half the neighborhood was out taking advantage of the "no sales tax" special, so this was a great spot to run the Speedtest iPhone app, since the new tower was just a few blocks away. As you can see in the chart above, the results weren't all that great. The peak of 1.4 MBPS download was nice, but there was a huge variance - down as low as 60 KBPS. At first I thought it might be unfair to test indoors, even though the entire front of the store is glass and I was only a few feet away. But I actually achieved that peak in the checkout line, and couldn't come close to it again. The worst results actually occurred when I was out of the store.
The lowest part (in the middle) of the chart above shows the results as I rode away (my wife was driving), and the last four results, in the gray rows of the table, show tests that I performed when I was back at home (approximately 1.5 miles away). Look at the chart again, and you'll see I achieved both the best (1.65 MBPS) and worst (25 KBPS) download speeds at home. The time interval between those results was five minutes. The upload test also failed once at home, and once closer to the new tower.So, to answer the original question, how fast is what AT&T claims as the "nation's fastest 3G network"? In this test of my neighborhood in the heart of Silicon Valley, it averaged just 446KBPS download, and 148 KBPS upload. Though the peaks were higher than in the test I published last year, the average is actually worse. And my wife still gets upset when she calls me on my cell while I am at home, and I miss the call because it went directly into voicemail.
-Mike
