Ericsson and TI to combine 3G chip technologies

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 24 July 2007 04:59

Business IT - Technology

Ericsson and Texas Instruments are to form a strategic technology 'engagement' to develop chips for 3G devices based on the popular 'Open' operating systems: Windows Mobile, Symbian S60, Symbian UIQ and Linux.

They claim that the result of their collaboration will be chipsets that will enable all handset manufacturers "to offer advanced Open OS handsets for both the high-end and the rapidly growing mid-range market...[able] to deliver the exciting mobile entertainment and multimedia experiences that consumers around the world are increasingly demanding."

The resulting chipsets will combine small and power efficient 3G modems from Ericsson Mobile Platforms with high-performance OMAP applications processors from TI and will include OMAP, custom baseband and connectivity technologies capable of supporting the major Open OS.

OMAP is the trademark for TI's proprietary microprocessors for multimedia applications. According to Wikipedia, "Some of the processors in the OMAP family contain a dual-core architecture consisting of both a general-purpose host ARM processor (a 32-bit RISC processor architecture developed by ARM Limited) and one or more DSP. The digital signals processor featured is commonly one or another variant of the Texas Instruments TMS320 series DSPs."

Ericsson and TI promise that the resulting chipsets will "seamlessly integrate the modem and applications processor [and] be presented in one pre-verified and tested platform reference design." They claim that "this approach will drastically reduce development and verification efforts previously undertaken by device manufacturers, enabling customers to rapidly bring highly advanced yet competitively priced products to market. The joint solutions will also benefit from the Ericsson Mobile Platforms interoperability testing processes.

Handsets based on these solutions are expected to be available on the market in the second half of 2008.