Players' list for LTE

Kudos to Xilinx Inc. and Wintegra Inc. for demonstrating a Long-Term Evolution platform at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. By combining on-chip baseband processing with the off-chip datapath capabilities of Wintegra’s WinPath-2 and WinPath-3, Xilinx has demonstrated a way to move beyond High-Speed Packet Access systems into the truly broadband 4G services of LTE. And we don’t have to wait for a single-chip FPGA implementation that tries to integrate a hard or soft RISC macro directly into the Virtex.

Now, if I was to roll my eyes and say “However…” at this point, one might think I’d be reiterating the observation I made for baseband infrastructure a couple weeks ago: that there will still be some interesting competition between traditional suppliers of DSP processors (Texas Instruments), integer processors (Intel’s Atom) and FPGA vendors for this highly-contested space.

Given the depth of the current recession, I have an even bigger “however” in mind. If we look at the declining market share of traditional cell phone vendors like Motorola, it’s questionable who will be participating in the smartphone market outside Apple, Samsung, Nokia, LG, HTC, and one or two China players. Intel was betting that its Atom platform would spark a new wave of Mobile Internet Device players who would revitalize the handheld data and video space, but Will Strauss of Forward Concepts sees familiar names like Samsung and HTC dominating.

Qualcomm certainly hoped that a burgeoning market for MediaFLO would help drive its SnapDragon platform into a combined mobile broadcast video and 4G platform, and that might still happen. In a post-recession environment, new startups could emerge to drive innovation the way Palm did for the PDA.

But I wonder. Will Research in Motion morph its Blackberry Storm into the ideal LTE platform? Will a laptop specialist like HP, Toshiba, or Lenovo prove important in the ultra-mobile PC market? Or will the volumes and international supply chains required for LTE client platforms demand a concentrated field with Apple and Samsung in the lead?

If the latter proves true, the Xilinx-Wintegra development platform could have as limited a customer base as the Intel Atom faces in the handheld field. But if startup innovation takes off again in LTE, we may see a hundred flowers bloom. The jury is still out on this one.