Barely a week after Nokia Corp. announced an initiative with Texas Instruments Inc. and STMicroelectronics, Qualcomm Inc. has seized the spotlight with a series of chip announcements, drawing attention to itself as a premier player in the space.
The announcements include a W-CDMA chipset that supports high-speed downlink packet access software, an end-to-end cdma2000 1xEV-DV revision D chipset, an entry-level cdma2000 1x chipset and a single chip solution that integrates application processors and modem processors.
The announcements, which feature CDMA and other technologies, are part of Qualcomm’s strategy to position itself not only as the big CDMA player, but as a respectable actor in the GSM/GPRS and W-CDMA scene, as industry moves toward merging the technologies.
“We’ve made a lot of impact in all protocols,” said Johan Lodenius, senior vice president of marketing and product management.
He also explained that the spurt of announcements was not propelled by the Nokia-backed initiative, adding “It makes us more focussed and more passionate, but it has not changed our plans.”
Nokia had announced last December its plan to roll out HSDPA technology, which is an enhanced form of W-CDMA. Qualcomm said its products will be available next year ahead of the market in terms of performance quality and integration, according to Lodenius.
HSDPA will enhance speed and other features over existing W-CDMA offerings, like still pictures and video telephony as well as graphics. It will also enhance other multimedia services like games and audio features.
With its EV-DV product, Qualcomm indicated its offering is superior to the Nokia-backed initiative, which is Release C. Lodenius described the Qualcomm product as having higher receive and transmit quality than is currently available in the market. He said Release D offers “real improvements” of DV and supports all the modes, including 1x and DO with backward compatibility with cdmaOne. He said Release D offers speeds of 1.2 Megabits per second, while Release C gives 153 kilobits per second.
Its MSM7000 line targets multimedia services by providing greater screen resolution, graphic performance and gaming experience for handsets, personal digital assistants, gaming and a variety of terminals.
“This new family of complete solutions ensures reduced design and development times, stimulating a greater number of affordable, high-end devices to spur mass-market adoption of wireless data services,” said Sanjay Jha, president of Qualcomm CDMA technologies.
With an eye to the entry-level third-generation market, Qualcomm said its MSM6025 will afford immediate opportunity for increased revenues for both data and voice.
