Qualcomm (QCOM) garnered a pair of significant wins this month as the chipmaker not only scored the main CPU for Nokia’s new Windows Phone 7 devices, but also supplies the baseband processor for the iPhone 4S. (A baseband processor is a chip or part of a chip that manages all the radio functions in a device.)
RCR Wireless News recently caught up with Qualcomm EVP Roberto Padovani, who served as the company’s CTO from 2001 until this year. Padovani was the keynote speaker at The Texas Wireless Summit, where he and many others were excited about the increasing amount of power and functionality that Qualcomm is now able to pack onto a single chip.
During his keynote address, Padovani told his audience that much of Qualcomm’s future growth will come from emerging markets, which are growing twice as quickly as developed countries. Many people outside the US will be getting Internet connectivity for the first time on a mobil device. He said that smartphone sales growth is far outpacing PC sales growth, with 4 billion handsets projected to be sold in the next 4 years, making the smartphone the computing platform of choice for the future.
Padovani said that one of the biggest challenges facing the wireless industry is data traffic growth, which he says will grow 10 to 12 times between 2010 and 2013. He said that video traffic places the greatest demands on networks and that as soon as more than one user in a given place wants to download a certain video, it may be more efficient to broadcast rather than unicast. Padovani said he expects a big announcement soon related to a wireless broadcast network.
Offloading data traffic to the cloud is one solution to the overwhelming data traffic, Padovani said, but for tasks that require high speed processing, the processing needs to be resident in the device. He also pointed out that bandwidth is not limited, and so this must also be considered as more apps and data are offloaded.
Padovani discussed femto cells as one partial solution to the spectrum crunch. He talked about the need for femto cells that can receive as well as transmit, pointing out that femto cells that cannot “hear” will not be able to adapt when they are interfering with macro cells not connected to the femto. Padovani says he thinks restricted access to femto cells does not make sense and will go away. He also thinks femto cells will have integrated WiFi going forward.
Padovani said that “augmented reality” is one of the new applications enabled by Qualcomm’s chipsets that particularly excites him. He looks forward to the day when he will be able to point his smartphone at a sign in a foreign country and the phone will take a picture of the sign and then translate it for him. He also showed his audience examples of animated images stored on the phone and displayed on physical objects.
