New 3G chips make 3G worst the wait

date: April 25, 2001

The delay of NTT DoCoMo's next-generation cellphones may disappoint those eager to glimpse Japan's latest wireless gizmos, but hot new chips due by the end of the year may make the technology worth waiting for.

The world's big chipmakers expect a new breed of silicon for the wireless world -- far faster with greater processing power and a minimal drain on portable batteries -- to help rescue the much-hyped, and now much-doubted, third-generation technology.

In the meantime, next-generation cell phones, which promise such cutting-edge features as videoconferencing and thief-proof online banking, will largely have to make do with the old stuff.

"For now, the handset manufacturers will be using what they've already got," said Masatomo Miura, manager of the Japan wireless terminals unit at Texas Instruments Inc, whose digital signal processors (DSPs) were at the core of nearly 60 percent of cellphones shipped last year.

"Aiming for next spring, though, they'll start volume production of wideband models, what we call 3G's 'second generation'," he said.

DoCoMo, Japan's dominant mobile carrier and the world frontrunner in wireless Internet services, had planned to launch its W-CDMA (wideband code division multiple access) service, the world's first commercial 3G offering, on May 30.

The company stunned the industry on Tuesday, however, by delaying its full-fledged 3G launch until October 1 due to worries about technological glitches.

3G's SECOND GENERATION

The launch was expected to pave the way for 3G, which will boost wireless transmission speeds by upwards of five to 25 times. European mobile carriers, having paid more than $100 billion for 3G licences in their home countries, were among those keenly eyeing DoCoMo's progress.

Most 3G watchers agree, however, that despite the huge technological difficulties, the biggest challenge for next-generation wireless will be coming up with cool, must-have features to snag wary consumers.

And the chipmakers say they have the answer.

"The key is to get people excited about the applications," Intel Corp senior vice president Ronald Smith said in an interview last week. "You need to unleash lots of applications developers. You need a high-performance general-purpose processor to enable that."

Intel, which spent billions of dollars over the past few years to acquire DSP firms and technology for wireless, plans to deliver such a processor by the end of the year to make it easier for programmers to develop new wireless applications.

The Intel architecture will compete head-on with TI's OMAP (open multimedia application platform) chips, due to reach customers in volume this autumn, that let software developers create wireless applications on popular operating systems such as Microsoft Corp's Windows CE or Symbian Ltd's EPOC.

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