Toshiba to Mass-Produce Next-Generation Cell Phone Chip

date: 16th January 2001, source: asiabiztech.com

Toshiba Corp. announced Monday that in the fourth quarter of 2001 it will begin mass-producing system chips for third-generation mobile phones that can send and receive video.

The system chip complies with the MPEG-4 global standard, and is capable of compressing and decompressing both MPEG-4 video and audio signals. It will make it possible for cell phone handsets to receive and display images from video distribution services. Handsets that feature the chip and have a built-in camera will also be able to compress and transmit video.

The 11mm square chip includes three 16-bit RISC (reduced instruction set computer) processors and 12M of DRAM (dynamic random access memory).

Power consumption by the chip has been reduced by using 0.18 micron line width circuitry. With a 60MHz operating frequency, the chip uses only 80 milliwatts of power even when processing video.

top