How will mobile phone trends affect the handset's digital signal processor?

September 21, 2005

What changes are coming to the mobile phone, and how will they affect the handset's digital signal processing? ABI Research has identified four major trends.

- Transition of cellular protocols to 3G and 4G standards. Even though the industry is, to date, barely deploying standards such as UMTS and EV-DO, demos are already under way for next generation standards that employ OFDM and MIMO to enable 100Mbit-type data rates.

- Advanced multimedia such as video conferencing, 3D gaming and graphics, and mobile TV. Such applications are very computing-intensive.

- Wireless connectivity technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Ultrawideband, and WiMAX. No technology is ideal in all applications, so the holy grail is to support all wireless technologies and protocols.

- Efforts to improve link margins and communications quality. With growing penetration of cellular networks worldwide, there is increased focus on improving cellular communications without significantly increasing network Capex and Opex.

How will these trends affect the DSP's design? Alan Varghese, ABI Research's principal analyst, semiconductor research, sees two pathways: one evolutionary, the other disruptive and revolutionary. "The evolutionary path," he notes, "involves increasing reliance on hardware accelerators and coprocessors to offload the DSP's work. But this approach might run into problems: it is going to be too complex to support all the hardware required for all the protocols mentioned above. A hardware-centric architecture also precludes quick adaptations to new requirements."

ABI Research sees revolutionary promise in a new set of vendors such as Sandbridge Technologies and Morpho Technologies, whose software-defined architectures are finally becoming viable in the handset. "Considering that the mobile phone DSP is approximately a $5 billion industry," Varghese concludes, "current market leaders may need to start looking over their shoulders."

ABI Research's new study, "DSP in the Mobile Phone -- Chipsets, Technologies and Market Drivers" discusses business models, technology trends, forecasts, and many other issues in detail.