TI adds hot tricks to cellphones

Eric Auchard

CANNES: Texas Instruments Inc., the world's top maker of chips for mobile phones, will unveil designs for a new class of phones that boast some of the hottest features now found in consumer electronics.

Texas Instruments of Dallas, Texas plans to spell out its architectural design for wireless chips to allow consumers to record and watch video, snap high-resolution pictures and play fast-moving interactive video games -- all on mobile phones.

These features should begin showing up in phones from phone makers such as Nokia, TI's biggest customer, as early as 2005.

Company executives plan to detail their plans at a news conference later on Monday at the 3GSM World Congress as the mobile communications industry's big annual conference swings into gear here at Cannes this week.

"We are trying to offer the quality of experience that is coming from the consumer world rather than what is expected from the computer world," Avner Goren, an official with TI's wireless terminals business unit, said in an interview.

In contrast to the early generation of so-called smartphones which merge some of the features of handheld computers into mobile phones, Texas Instruments aims for the next generation of mobile phones to be no-sacrifices gadgets.

Goren said mobile phones will add features previously found in camcorders, televisions or high-end digital cameras.

Dubbed the "OMAP 2" architecture, TI's new designs for phones running on high-speed mobile networks will allow manufacturers from Japan to Europe to the United States to heap advanced consumer electronic features into mobile phones.

The first OMAP 2 processors and companion chips are due in sample volumes for manufacturers in the first half of 2004.

An entire generation of microprocessors eventually will result from these designs, he said. OMAP 2 offers what is called "parallel processing" -- the capacity for multiple features to run at once without interrupting one other.

Cameraphones using TI circuitry will offer picture quality of up to four megapixels, and could eventually grow up to six megapixel quality, now the upper limit for consumer-oriented digital cameras priced under $1,000.

Other eye-candy features enabled by the TI system would be DVD-quality video, high-fidelity music that envelops the listener and color liquid crystal displays, Goren said.

Consumers could take camcorder pictures with a mobile phone and then plug it into a TV set at home to watch the pictures or video. Another use could be to pipe analog or digital broadcast TV onto mobile phones. "For commuters, this may be a very interesting application," Goren said.

Such phones may come close to competing with the quality of current home video game consoles as Texas Instruments promises to offer more complex games capable of displaying two million polygons per second -- a key measure of speed. That's up from the 720,000 polygons now possible on such phones.

BATTERY LIFE ISSUE LOOMS

The biggest factor limiting such new features will be how Texas Instruments handles the trade-off with the short battery life of most compact mobile devices.

Goren said TI engineers have been grappling with the question of "How do we add to those features without sacrificing battery life?"

Already the current generation of mobile phones in Japan running on TI chips can remain in "stand-by" mode for up to two weeks and send and receive up to 90 minutes of video.

Gartner wireless semiconductor analyst, Alan Brown in London said that Texas Instruments is piling on features in order to distance themselves from competing wireless circuit makers.

These include Qualcomm Inc, which is focused on fast-growing emerging markets and the United States, and Intel Corp, the world's biggest computer chipmaker, which is angling in on a piece of the mobile phone business.

"Texas Instruments is defending its territory pretty well," Brown said. "But it has to be careful not to put too many things in the paintbox," he said of the battery-life limits.

Besides Nokia, Texas Instruments supplies a majority of the digital signal processors that run inside the latest generation of phones from Japan's DoCoMo. TI customers NEC, MCI (Panasonic) and Fujitsu are all suppliers of DoCoMo, TI said.

© Reuters