TI Targets Low-Cost Cell Phones

By Colleen Taylor -- Electronic News, 11/9/2006

With the global mobile phone market showing no signs of slowing down, particularly in developing areas in need of lower-cost products, Texas Instruments Inc. today announced a new OMAP-Vox single-chip solution the company said will foster development of lower-cost multimedia-rich feature phones. 

Codenamed "eCosto," the new single-chip platform is leveraging TI's DRP technology with the "LoCosto" value platform in volume production today. The eCosto platform also leverages the multimedia capabilities of the OMAP-Vox platform in volume production today with the OMAPV1030 solution.  The first product in the new "eCosto" platform will be the OMAPV1035 single-chip solution, which will be manufactured in 65nm and will support GSM, GPRS and EDGE standards.

The "eCosto" platform incorporates TI's DRP technology, an approach to wireless chip design which applies digital technology to simplify radio frequency (RF) processing in advanced CMOS process technology. Integrating the RF transceiver and analog codec with the digital baseband significantly reduces board space and extends battery life, according to TI.  

As the current OMAPV1030 and new OMAPV1035 solutions share a common software platform, OMAP-Vox customers will be able to re-use their application and modem software investments, the company said.

The "eCosto" platform's capabilities include advanced video capture, playback and streaming with up to QVGA screen quality at 30 frames-per-second; digital still camera up to three megapixels with sub-second shot-to-shot delay; color LCD; and interactive 2D/3D gaming with graphics comparable to that of portable video consoles. The OMAPV1035 solution boasts high-speed hardware-accelerated Java and 3D graphic processing up to 100-K polygons-per-second, TI said.  The OMAPV1035 solution is the industry's first ARM9 fully integrated single-chip digital baseband with DSP in 65nm, the company added.

The OMAPV1035 single-chip solution will sample in the first half 2007 and will be in production in 2008. The OMAPV1030 solution is in mass production in handsets today.