Reality Check | Ephraim Schwartz » IBM announces system-on-a-chip breakthrough for multi-band cell phones

September 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

IBM announces system-on-a-chip breakthrough for multi-band cell phones

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The holy grail for all chipset and device manufacturers is to reduce the chip count.By doing so the BOM [Bill of Materials] is also reduced as is the heat and power generated, critical in small mobile devices such as cellular handsets.

This is often called system-on-a-chip.

So I suppose a few corks were popped today when IBM announced that it has designed a way to put multiple RF functions onto a single chip.

The chip, designanted CMOS 7RF SOI, will allow manufacturers to burn multi-band RF frequencies and analog functions onto a single semiconductor.

If the technology does indeed result in lower cost cell phones it should be good news for emerging markets that look to mobile phones as a low cost way of by-passing deployment of traditional telecommunications infrastructure for communications.

Evaluation chips along with design kits will ship in the first half of 08.

The technology is also expected to "minimize insertion loss and maximize isolation" which will improve signal loss and the occurrence of dropped calls, according to an IBM statement.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 12, 2007 02:06 PM

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