Broadcom aims multimedia chip at phones

Broadcom is demonstrating a multimedia processor at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, this week that could help lower two barriers to high-quality video on handsets: high price and short battery life.

The Irvine, California, company designed its VideoCore BCM2705 chip to make midrange phones — ones that cost mobile subscribers about $100 to $200 — into TVs, camcorders and 4-megapixel digital cameras. Today these capabilities are generally found only in more expensive phones.

Mobile operators are looking to TV, games, video clips, photo sharing, videoconferencing and other multimedia activities as potentially lucrative consumer services. Before large numbers of mobile phone users embrace those capabilities, the features will have to be available in less expensive phones, said Allen Nogee, an analyst at In-Stat in Scottsdale, Arizona. The market for high-end phones priced over $200 is very small, at less than 10 percent of the total handset market, he said.

In addition, high-quality video and image features stunt the battery life of current phones, Nogee said. Under multimedia use, they tend to last less than two hours, he said.

“It doesn’t give you much margin left to make a phone call,” Nogee said.

Broadcom claims its chip has the lowest power consumption of any mobile multimedia chip at 16 to 20 milliamps. With the new chip, which Broadcom expects to come out in phones during this year’s fourth-quarter holiday season, midrange phones can have the battery life that’s typical today in less capable phones, said Broadcom spokesman Jeremy Hyatt.

The VideoCore BCM2705 can support high-quality VGA (video graphics array) video on a two-inch color LCD (liquid crystal display) screen at 30 frames per second, delivering performance comparable to conventional TV, according to Broadcom. It can also support MPEG-4 video encoding and decoding for video recording and playback, a capability found today on some digital camcorders. The chip is based on the VideoCore BCM2702, which Broadcom acquired through its purchase of Alphamosaic last year and began shipping in volume earlier this year. To tailor it to midrange phones, Broadcom reduced the amount of memory in the chip and removed the capability to plug it into a TV for big-screen video playback, Hyatt said.

Broadcom is relatively new to mobile phone chips, but it’s not the only newcomer, analysts said. Demand for multimedia processing in handsets has drawn the interest of Intel and PC graphics chip makers NVidia and ATI Technologies in addition to long-time cell phone chip vendor Texas Instruments, said Avi Greengart of Current Analysis, in Sterling, Virginia. All those vendors either have high-end phone chips like the BCM2705 or are working on them, he said. The BCM2705 is available in sample quantities and expected to ship in volume in the second half of this year, priced around $30 each in shipments of 10,000, Hyatt said.

Phones with video display, camcorder and high-resolution camera capability all have started to catch on in Europe and Asia and may become popular in North America as well, analysts said. From its customers’ perspective, Broadcom is aiming the right direction with this chip, according to Greengart.

“Handset vendors are looking to increase multimedia capability without impacting price or battery life,” he said.

Keeping the battery alive as long as possible is critical for mobile subscribers because being able to make voice calls is still their highest priority, Greengart said. And there’s no easy way around the power consumption issue.

“There’s been no fundamental breakthrough in physics in terms of battery life,” Greengart said.