Europe : Renesas Technology Corp. and Symbian Ltd. announced an agreement to add full-scale support for Symbian OS, the market leading open OS for smartphones, to Renesas Technology’s advanced silicon platform for 3G mobile phones. Porting the popular Symbian OS to the Renesas mobile platform will enable handset manufacturers to create smaller and differentiated handsets to market while significantly reducing development time and costs of phones.

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Renesas Technology together with NTT Docomo, Japan’s largest mobile telecom company is currently developing a single-chip LSI that combines a dual-mode (GSM/GPRS and W-CDMA) 3G baseband processor and an application processor for improved multimedia performance that is required in next generation 3G handsets. The platform will also incorporate a modem function such as an RF front-end IC and RF power amplifier, and software such as a protocol stack, middleware, drivers and Symbian OS.

“By making the most of Renesas Technology and Symbian’s expertise in smartphone technology, Renesas will further accelerate the proliferation of Renesas Technology’s highly integrated, market-ready mobile platform into the 3G market.” Ikuya Kawasaki, deputy general manager of system solution business unit 2 at Renesas Technology Corp.

“The Renesas Technology 3G mobile platform will enable Symbian OS licensees to develop an even wider variety of smaller, differentiated, competitively priced Symbian OS phones that meet the specific needs of their network operator customers and help bring Symbian OS further into the mass market,” said Morgan Gillis, executive vice president, Symbian.

Symbian OS powers the world’s most popular smartphones. Almost 20 million Symbian OS mobile phones have been sold worldwide making it the most widely adopted open standards based operating systems in the market.

The 3G mobile platform will be available in the second quarter of 2006, as will production quantities of Renesas Technology’s dual-mode single chip LSI.