Phone-on-a-chip Coming Soon

Bill Krenik, who heads up research and development in Texas Instruments (TI) wireless terminals business unit has been revealing the companies intention to create an integrated chip that will hold all of the functionality of a current smartphone, on a single chip. TI plan to have it available by the end of 2004.

TI, the world’s largest maker of cell phone chips say the integrated chip would reduction power consumption by a half and free up large amounts of the valuable system board real estate for additional chips providing features Wi-Fi high-speed wireless networking and satellite location tracking to be added to phones.

TI is not alone in thinking along these lines. Samsung were speaking about this very idea last week. They prefer the term System-in-Package chip and plan to show it at the coming GSM World Congress Conference in Cannes. Their chip will include a 203MHz ARM-based processor with 256MB of NAND flash memory, 256MB of SDRAM and support for USB.