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Moto, Qualcomm ally on UMTS handsets

Posted by Loring Wirbel on November 14, 2006

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Extending their CDMA 2000 alliance as expected this week, Motorola and Qualcomm advanced the pact to cover future 3G phones based on Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) standards.

At the same time, Qualcomm Inc. (San Diego, Calif.) announced two single-chip designs that will implement protocols for both UMTS and either high-speed downlink packet access, a 3G data standard, or the Edge data standard for GSM migration.

Motorola Inc. (Libertyville, Ill.) and Qualcomm have collaborated since the early days of CDMA in the mid-1990s, a relationship that once brought along Freescale Semiconductor — the former Motorola Semiconductor — as a second source for CDMA baseband and RF/IF chips. In the new alliance, Motorola's Mobile Devices group has approved a series of Qualcomm Mobile Station Modem designs for UMTS handsets.

Qualcomm's first single-chip UMTS implementations are the QSC6240, dubbed "Wedge," a device combining support for wideband CDMA and GSM/GPRS/Edge; and QSC6270, or "Hedge," a device supporting HSDPA, wideband CDMA and GSM/GPRS/Edge.

Both chips integrate a baseband processor, multimedia processor and receiver on a monolithic 65-nanometer CMOS die. The chips integrate a USB 2.0 port and advanced codecs like eAAC+ and H.264. They can support camera resolutions to 3 Mpixels, and as many as 72 simultaneous polyphonic ringtones.

Qualcomm simultaneously introduced an open development platform for wideband CDMA, CDMA 2000 and HSDPA/HSUPA features called Snapdragon, based on a 1-GHz control processor called Scorpion, and a 600-MHz DSP. Qualcomm expects Snapdragon to form the basis of multiple phone and gaming platforms, based on support for additional networking features such as MediaFlo, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Samsung Electronics is the first handset manufacturer to announce support for Snapdragon.