TI Unveils Powerful Phone Chips

Chip maker Texas Instruments has announced five new processors intended to make next-generation phones smaller, more powerful, and less power-hungry.

The five Omap chips include three in the 161x series that can be coupled with chip sets for any cellular network, and two 73x series chips that incorporate a GSM/GPRS modem. They are intended for handsets that will offer enhanced multimedia, connectivity, and security applications running on fast third-generation (3G) wireless networks.

They are expected to be ready for use in handsets when the first 3G nets start up in this country, which is anticipated to be late this year or in 2004.

"The products provide another level of reduction in power requirements and an increase in performance that's going to be required to provide next-generation mobile communications services," says Garner analyst Stan Breuderle. Among other things, these phones are expected to play movies, games, and music without paying a heavy price in battery life.

While 3G networks are already available in Japan and Korea, Breuderle says the first phones being used on these networks are rather large and have a fairly limited battery life. With these new TI chips and their competitors, hardware vendors "will be able to make those kinds of products with battery lives that start to approach what people expect from a handset," Breuderle says.

More Power, Endurance

TI says all five of its new chips deliver significant performance improvements over their existing competitors. Specifically, 2D graphics apps will run up to 2.5 times faster, and Java code will execute up to 8 times faster, according to the company. Also, audio applications such as MP3 playback will see gains of up to 1.7 times thanks to TI's multimedia instruction set architecture.

All of the chips include hardware-based security, which will make it simpler to enable digital rights management or data encryption features on handsets. Adding such security features to existing devices in software would exact a heavy toll in power consumption.

Finally, TI's new "extreme deep sleep mode" enables these chips to consume less than 10 microamperes when idle, or one-tenth the standby power consumption of their predecessors.

"All the hooks and handles are there to make some pretty elaborate cell phones," says Will Strauss, principal analyst with the semiconductor market research firm Forward Concepts.

Strauss says TI's chip lineup will allow hardware developers great flexibility in designing devices. "The Swiss army knife approach allows companies to differentiate their products," he says.

TI chips already account for half the unit shipments in the cell phone market, Straus said. "TI is not only protecting its turf, it intends to be in a lot of other devices."

The Fine Print

The baseline member of the Omap161x series is the Omap1610, successor to the Omap1510 stand-alone applications processor. The Omap1611 adds 2MB of internal memory plus a low pin count, dedicated connection for all three major flavors of Wi-Fi (11-mbps, 2.4-GHz-band 802.11b; 54-mpbs, 2.4-GHz-band 802.11g; and 54-mbps, 5-GHz-band 802.11a). The Omap1612 is the same as the Omap1611 but with 256MB of stacked ultra-low-power mobile DDR memory.

The Omap73x series combines an application processor with a GSM/GPRS Class 12 modem--on a single chip. TI says the Omap73x series delivers twice the applications performance of its predecessor, the Omap710, while doubling standby time and requiring less than half the board space, meaning devices can get smaller.

The Omap730 has an internal SRAM frame buffer as well as the same low pin count Wi-Fi connection as the 161x series. The Omap732 adds up to 256MB of stacked mobile SDRAM.

TI expects to deliver samples of the Omap1610, 1611, and 730 to customers by April, with samples of the chips with stacked memory to follow by midyear. All five chips should be in volume production by the fourth quarter of 2003, and TI believes the first devices using the new chips could be on the market by year's end.