TI, ADI Fight Battle of the Basebands

Electronic News, Feb 19, 2001 by Tom Murphy

OMAP and SoftFone target 3G cellular handset markets

The race for design wins for 2.5G and 3G cellular handsets is heating up this week as Texas Instruments Inc. and Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) roll out competing baseband products.

TI (nyse: TXN) said its open media applications platform (OMAP) baseband processor combines its relatively new C55x DSP core with an ARM9 microprocessor core. In addition to a list of peripheral functions, the OMAP processor has enough MIPS in the ARM9 to accommodate the application intensive processing expected in next-generation cellular handsets.

TI already has development commitments from handset makers Nokia, Ericsson and Sony Corp., according to Paul Werp, OMAP marketing manager for TI, Dallas. The strategy behind OMAP was to prepublicize the architecture and to encourage the development of applications. Demonstrating the success of that strategy, Israeli software start-up SnapShield Ltd., at the Wireless Portable Symposium in San Jose last week, was using an OMAP development board to demonstrate a transmission security application.

TI has a considerable market-share lead in cellular handsets, based on its previous-generation baseband processor for second-generation phones, Werp said. That processor incorporated a C54x DSP core and an ARM7 microcontroller.

The newest baseband processor is designed to stave off increasing competition from the likes of Qualcomm, Motorola, Intel and ADI.

ADI (nyse: ADI) is unveiling its latest baseband processor, known as SoftFone, at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France. The new processor is the result of ADI and Intel Corp.'s jointly developed DSP core, known as Frio, according to Doug Grant, business development director for ADI's RF and wireless systems business unit.

"What TI is providing is a second OMAP chip to go into cell phones," said Will Strauss, analyst for the market research firm Forward Concepts Co., Tempe, Ariz. "While the DSP will do all the baseband processing, the RISC portion will do all of the interface with the display, the phone book, some video and MiPEG4 decoding. They are adding to the various features of a cell phone."

What ADI is announcing is a baseband processor for its new voice-centric cell phone reference design, Strauss said. The SoftFone will be paired with ADI's Othello chipset, which features a direct-conversion radio for reduced component counts.

Strauss said that the SoftFone and Othello package is likely to appeal to second- and third-tier cell phone OEMs who want easy integration. While not likely to find a design win at Nokia and Ericsson, Strauss said the chipset would be sought after by Chinese and Taiwanese OEMs. That market is still important because mainland China is shaping up to be the world's-largest cell phone market.

While Strauss said SoftFone was mostly voice-centric, Grant said the new chip is also a development platform for 3G applications and comes equipped with power-scaling technology. That aspect is designed to save battery life by scaling back the clock and reducing the voltage at the core when the device is not being operated.

"This announcement, coupled with our new direct conversion radio, should make TI uncomfortable," Grant said. "This is a more complete approach for multimedia applications and control functions in wireless terminal devices."

Intel (nasdaq: INTC) is also interested in invigorating application development on its Personal Client Architecture platform, which includes its ARM-based XScale processor and its Frio DSP core.

TI also introduced a DSP BIOS bridge with its new OMAP platform. The bridge allows application developers to build programs that run on the DSP and RISC cores simultaneously, Werp said.

Both companies are aggressively marketing software development kits, which allow OEMs to program the DSPs in higher-level languages and come with ready-to-go software algorithms for specific functions. However, TI's OMAP platform is code-compatible with its previous generation of baseband processors, which should provide cell phone OEMs with an extra incentive to retain the TI design, according to Tom Starnes, an analyst with the market research firm Gartner Dataquest, San Jose.