The PXA800F chip also marks the escalation of the ongoing competition between Intel and Texas Instruments in the mobile phone business. For years, TI has been the dominant supplier of digital signal processors, a crucial component that tunes signals inside handsets, while Intel has been the leader in flash memory. TI has deals with most of the major brand mobile phone makers, but Intel is making headway with Asian contract manufacturers, which increasingly will take over phone design and manufacturing for the big brands. Intel has also been the primary supplier of microprocessors and flash in the PocketPC market. TI, meanwhile, supplies microprocessors to handheld market share leader Palm. Phone makers have sample versions of the chips now and are developing devices that will be available later this year or early next year. A handful of original design manufacturers in Asia, Korea and Taiwan will be coming out with devices. With the coming era of integrated parts, each company is leading with its strengths. Integration cuts power and costs, so manufacturers love it, allowing the chipmaker to colonise more real estate inside phones. Manitoba, for instance, includes flash, a microprocessor and a DSP but not the radio frequency (RF) chips, which catch and transmit signals over the air, or the power management chip. RF chips are analogue chips (meaning that they deal with real-world gradations of temperature or sound) and are generally made with different processes and materials than digital chips (microprocessors and the like that deal only with ones and zeros). Intel has a very limited history in analogue design. Integrating the radio chip at this time doesn't add much benefit, said an Intel spokesman. Still, in the future, Intel will come out with radios made on regular silicon processes. Some of these chips will even be reconfigurable, so that they can be used alternately as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or other types of receivers. Eventually, these chips will be integrated into microprocessors. TI, by contrast, has long been a leader in analogue chips and under its "cell phone on a chip" strategy, it plans to integrate a microprocessor, DSP, and radio functions together. TI, however, won't incorporate flash. The company has sold microprocessors with integrated flash before and mobile phone manufacturers have not bought them, said Dennis Buss, vice president of silicon technology development at TI. "The radio challenges at the system level disappear," said Bill Krenik, advanced architecture manager at TI. The first of these integrated chips will ship to manufacturers in 2004 and appear in phones in 2005. Intel is also expected to have an integrated chip as well. Instead, TI will encourage mobile phone makers to recover some of the cost normally associated with integration by using new types of packaging techniques that vertically stack the flash memory on top of other chips. Vertical stacking reduces board surface area and hence costs. Intel is also promoting vertical packaging. Krenik and Buss both admit that adding radios to silicon has raised eyebrows. A number of academics and analysts have said that it can't be done economically, they said. Nonetheless, TI remains confident. The company started work on silicon radios four years ago and decided 18 months ago that experimental data showed it would be feasible. Studies at the University of Oulu in Finland also validate the data. Patents regarding this process are pending. The company will discuss its plans in more detail in the future. A small Bluetooth radio released earlier this year reflects the direction TI is headed, Krenik added. Mobile phones aren't the first time Intel and TI have raced. TI founder Jack Kilby and Intel founder Robert Noyce each invented the integrated circuit around the same time.
If it moves, we cover it. See ZDNet UK's Mobile Technology News Section for the latest news, reviews and price checks on mobile phones, PDAs, notebook computers and anything else you can take away.
Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom.
