Mobile phone designs adopting a common architecture recently have been gaining momentum The central part of this movement is a microcontroller executing application software for processing moving pictures, music, and others. The winner of the first round is OMAP of U.S.-based Texas Instruments Inc. So far, no leading manufacturer of mobile phones has adopted the XScale chip of Intel Corp. Indeed, Intel is trying to recover from its setback.
Industry Standard to Emerge
Leading manufacturers of mobile appliances have begun switching to microcontrollers developed by major semiconductor makers for the use of mobile appliances from their own products. NEC Corp. at first used its own CPU core V850 but it later adopted Intel's StrongARM for its mobile handset called N2002, a FOMA-compliant model marketed in November 2001.
Moreover, in March 2002, NEC, together with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., and Matsushita Communication Industrial Co., Ltd., which have formed an alliance in developing the architecture for mobile phones, announced a plan to adopt TI's OMAP for the next-generation mobile appliances. Adding to the above movements, Fujitsu Ltd. has decided to adopt the OMAP for its 3G mobile handsets.
Those movements show that the world's industry standard architecture for mobile phones will soon emerge followed by common software of the operating system (OS) and middleware.
Handset manufacturers aim to reduce their burdens of software development. For example, handset manufacturers must change the mobile handset specifications in compliance with various requirements of local communication operators. But if adopting a major semiconductor manufacturer's microcontroller for mobile handsets they can easily acquire the required functions thanks to vendors' offerings, from those such as Microsoft Corp. and Symbian Ltd., of OS and middleware for each of those microcontrollers. Middleware and application software developed by independent vendors will also become available for mobile handset manufacturers.
While applying the major microcontrollers, mobile handset manufacturers can concentrate their development efforts on innovative functions and save such efforts on functions that are hard to differentiate.
Entry to Handset Manufacturing to Become Easier
The architecture standardization for mobile phones in terms of hardware and software will progress further. As a result, device manufacturers that had been hesitating to launch mobile handsets will be able to enter it. There are already some indications of such moves.
Major semiconductor makers providing the microcontrollers to their clients have began to offer extensive technical know-how to the newcomers. For example, Intel, TI, and others have been establishing collaboration with several makers of Taiwan and China since a few years ago.
TI offers its own communication control software including the protocol stack. Such know-how and software had been confidential to protect proprietary technologies.
If handset manufacturers in Taiwan and China -- with help from the world's major semiconductor manufacturers -- start volume manufacturing of mobile handsets equipped with a combination of microcontrollers and OSs, the current handset manufacturers may not be able to compete effectively with Taiwan and Chinese manufacturers in price competition.
OMAP Ahead of Competitors, XScale in Pursuit
In the microcontroller market for mobile phones, TI and Intel are expected to be main players.
TI's chipsets for mobile phones have been widely adopted for many mobile handsets including those of Finland's Nokia and others. TI is pushing its dominance to also apply to 3G mobile phones. Intel, which is the leading manufacturer of microprocessors for PCs, has achieved the top share of StrongARM microcontrollers for PDAs with the Pocket PC 2002 of Microsoft Corp. With such expertise, Intel is going to tackle the mobile phone handset market.
TI's OMAP has been the top microcontroller for mobile phones. Most major mobile phone manufacturers, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Ltd., Sendo Ltd., NEC, Matsushita Electric, and Matsushita Communication, and Fujitsu Ltd. have announced adoption of TI's microcontroller. On the other hand, no major mobile phone manufacturer has announced the adoption of Intel's XScale.
Why these manufacturers have selected TI's OMAP is because OMAP has less power dissipation than XScale when executing the same process. In regard to the OMAP chip, its DSP core is integrated into the chip and its power dissipation has been suppressed as a result of increasing the number of instructions per cycle.
In contract to OMAP's power-reduction method, Intel's XScale chip is designed to reduce its effective power dissipation by means of dynamic switching both of power supply voltage and operating frequency of the CPU core. But, the fact that there is no OS supporting XScale's power management function puts XScale in a less advantageous position as handsets must be equipped with a power control LSI exclusively for executing the dynamic switching of the power supply voltage.
Intel, watching OMAP go ahead, has a plan to take it on with its next version of XScale microcontrollers in the second half of 2002. Intel will promote one-chip integration. It aims to realize reduction in power dissipation and assembling areas for mounting on the printed circuit board by integrating peripheral circuits into one chip LSI including not only a DSP core, but also flash EEPROMs and SRAMs.
(Hiroki Eda, Tomonori Shindo, Staff Editors, Nikkei Electronics)
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