TI upgrades 3G smart phone processors

Texas Instruments on Tuesday plans to release new processors for mobile phones that improve the performance of multimedia applications in phones on third-generation cellular networks, according to company executives.

Both processors are part of TI’s OMAP family of mobile phone chips, but they are aimed at different parts of the market, said Henry Saam, senior marketing manager. The OMAP2430 is a stand-alone applications processor for high-end phones, while the OMAPV2230 combines an applications processor with the communications silicon required to connect to a UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) or WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) network, Saam said.

Samples are now shipping to TI’s customers, Saam said. The first phones using the chips will appear in the second half of 2006 on NTT DoCoMo’s WCDMA network, he said.

Mobile phone manufacturers traditionally have chosen to use multiple chips to power high-end phones with demanding applications while using integrated chips to reduce the cost of building a regular mobile phone. But the recent demand for moderately priced smart phones, handsets that combine Web browsing and e-mail with the ability to make phone calls, are leading phone vendors to use integrated chips in more capable phones, said Robert Tolbert, product marketing manager with TI.

An integrated mobile phone processor allows vendors to reduce the bill of materials needed to produce a phone and is often easier to implement, Tolbert said. The natural increases in performance delivered by improvements in chip-making technology mean that modern integrated chips offer sufficient performance to handle most applications on smart phones, he said.

But phone vendors that are building portable media devices designed for gaming and telephony will still need a high-performance applications processor such as the OMAP2430, Saam said. Over time, TI expects more phone vendors to be able to take advantage of the cost savings of integrated chips, but this market is evolving in a different manner from the PC market, he said.

PC vendors mostly have used processors and operating systems from a single vendor, whereas mobile phone vendors work with several different processor vendors, including TI, Freescale Semiconductor, and Intel, and use operating systems from Microsoft, Access Co., Symbian, and others. It’s not likely that mobile phone vendors will abandon the flexibility of using a stand-alone applications processor until the market sorts out winners and losers, Saam said.

The OMAPV2230 uses NTT’s WCDMA chip set alongside a TI OMAP applications processor, Saam said. It supports several operating systems and will allow phone vendors to build five-megapixel cameras into their phones, he said.

The OMAP2430 improves video decoding by four times the performance of the previous generation of OMAP stand-alone processors, allowing the chip to deliver DVD-quality video, Tolbert said. It also now supports the Hi-Speed USB (Universal Serial Bus) standard, which will allow users to get video from their PCs to phones much more quickly, he said.

Pricing for either chip was not disclosed.