Inflection Points : Wireless and SDR

Continuing the series on inflection points, Eyal Bergman, Director of Product Marketing for CEVA shares his thoughts about the inflection point timeline in a near term perspective with a focus on wireless baseband and SDR (software defined radio). With regards to what is driving demand for wireless service Eyal observes:  

… The latest AT&T numbers show that it added 2.7 million new wireless customers in the fourth quarter of 2009. But this is not the big news - out of the new 2.7 new users 1 million are non-phone devices, with devices like the Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader.

He also points out how SDR may be the technological approach to enable 4G devices because:

… We need to look into new types of architectures as conventional DSPs and CPUs are incapable of meeting both the processing requirements and power and cost constrains of 4G chips.

I encourage you to read all of the posts around the inflection points series; maybe they will inspire you to share your observations. If you have insight into “obvious” inflection points that did not come to pass (for example how Blue Tooth is – or is not – the be all for wireless data), please contact me. I would love to be able to add some perspectives of how the market misread technology inflection points to this series. I suspect there are some valuable lessons to be gleaned from comparing such stories.

To make following this series easier (especially as multiple series overlap each other), I am including the index below to previous posts, both on this and the guest post channels.

Guest posts:

2010, February 1 : Of Windows, Newton’s, iPad’s and 10GBASE-T

2010, January 28 : Technology inflections : digital signal processing

Posts made here

2010, February 1 : Inflection Points : timeline (networking)

2010, January 28 : Inflection Points : timeline

2010, January 26 : Inflection Points