News and New Products

EDGE chip set offers multimedia features, slashes BOM

By Maury Wright -- EDN, 10/17/2005

Although much of the hype in the handset business revolves around 3G standards, such as wideband CDMA (code-division multiple access), the bulk of the market is still in 2.5G standards, such as EDGE (enhanced data for GSM evolution). That fact led Agere to deliver the first member of its new Vision mobile-handset architecture in the EDGE flavor. The Vision X115 design seeks to maximize multimedia capabilities in a handset for mainstream customers and the 2.5G networks and do so in a way that Agere claims reduces cost by 20%. Mark Bode, director of product marketing, claims that the typical BOM (bill of materials) of an EDGE phone is in the low $50s for the ICs in the handset. Bode claims the X115 will reduce that BOM to the low- to mid-$40s.

Agere partitions the X115 design into digital- and analog-baseband ICs. The digital chip integrates three processing cores. An Agere DSP 16000 core is dedicated to PHY (physical)-level processing and the voice-codec tasks. An ARM 7 core is also dedicated to the EDGE function. An ARM 9 is available for applications and multimedia tasks, such as audio and video decoding.

The design supports dual color displays, including a primary QVGA or QCIF (Quarter Intermediate Format) display with 262,000 colors, as well as a 2 million-pixel camera for image input. The application processor enables playback of H.263 or H.264 (MPEG 4) video streams and MP3 or AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) audio streams. Bode claims that graphics performance is the other strong point of the design. The design attained a score of 350 in the independent JBenchmark 2.0 tests that essentially measure gaming performance. Bode claims that 350 score places the design in the upper 10% of smart phones and PDAs tested and that Agere has yet to optimize the implementation that was tested.

Agere Systems, www.agere.com.