SDR Insider

30 Ways to Rate a College

John Glossner — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:17:51 +0000

With two of my kids in college and another one headed there this year I was delighted to find an article on how colleges are rated by the various magazines.

Finally Official? – Intel to buy Infineon Wireless for $1.4B

John Glossner — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:56:14 +0000

VentureBeat is reporting that Intel has agreed to purchase Infineon’s mobile chip business for $1.4 billion, the companies said late Sunday. The move by the world’s largest chip maker will help boost the company’s presence in smartphones, which have begun to dominate the computing landscape. Rumors of the deal have been around for a while.

Analyst: Infineon, TI are second tier in mobile chips

John Glossner — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:45:16 +0000

EE Times reports Infineon, Marvell, Renesas and Texas Instruments are forming the second tier of chip suppliers to the mobile phone industry and the mobile business units of these companies are potentially liable to merger and acquisition activity, according to Mike Bryant, an analyst with Future Horizons. Companies with even less [...]

CTIA claims SF phone radiation law unconstitutional

John Glossner — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:43:10 +0000

The Register reports Cellular trade body The CTIA is challenging a San Francisco ordinance that requires radiation labels on every mobile phone sold, claiming that such a rule breaches the US constitution. The ordinance, passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in June, requires buyers to be informed “at the point of [...]

LTE Patent Battle

John Glossner — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:38:52 +0000

DailyWireless reports The dream of driving down LTE royalty levels dramatically is fading, says Caroline Gabriel at Rethink Research. Intel and Samsung have sought to spearhead an open, transparent and low royalty structure for WiMAX patents and formed the Open Patent Alliance (OPA) in June 2008. That doesn’t seem to be the case with LTE. Qualcomm [...]

Smartphone Comparison Chart

John Glossner — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 12:32:16 +0000

Lifehacker has a nice features chart here. If you’re in the market for a current generation smartphone all the new features and specs can be confusing at best. This extensive—but easy to read!—chart will help you navigate the world of smartphone features and specifications.

Octasic Introduces New Multi-Core DSP Device for Wireless Baseband

John Glossner — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 12:29:13 +0000

MONTREAL, Canada – June 21, 2010 – Octasic Inc., a leading innovator of media processing and wireless solutions, today announced the industry’s most efficient multi-core DSP devices for basestation PHY and MAC. The OCT2224W is part of Octasic’s latest family of multi-core DSP solutions (see related announcement). Delivering three times [...]

CEA-Leti Unveils Low-Power Reconfigurable Multicore Chip for Software-Defined Radio and Cognitive Radio

John Glossner — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:18:59 +0000

GRENOBLE, France–(BUSINESS WIRE)– CEA-Leti announced today that it has developed a digital baseband circuit for software-defined-radio and cognitive-radio applications that features less than 50 microseconds (µs) for full reconfiguration and [...]

Cognovo launches Software Defined Modem solution for LTE handsets

John Glossner — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:11:33 +0000

Cambridge, UK – 17 June 2010 – Cognovo today announces its Software Defined Modem (SDM) platform designed to significantly reduce cost, size and design complexity for developers of cellular handsets and other wireless enabled consumer electronic products. The SDM platform is already under evaluation at leading handset OEMs who are seeing for themselves how Cognovo’s software centric design flow [...]

Imec’s cognitive baseband radio to support 4G and broadband access to multiple services

John Glossner — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:47:35 +0000

Leuven, Belgium – June 8, 2010 – Imec introduces a cognitive baseband radio (COBRA) architecture targeting 4G requirements at up to 1Gbit/s throughput and multiple asynchronous concurrent streams (for instance simultaneous digital broadcasting reception and high-speed internet access). The low-cost, flexible architecture answers a new trend in wireless communication where [...]

Renesas Electronics to acquire Nokia’s wireless modem business

John Glossner — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:43:30 +0000

Espoo, Finland and Tokyo, Japan – Renesas Electronics Corporation, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, and Nokia Corporation, the world leader in mobile communications, today announced that they are deepening their collaboration by forming a strategic business alliance to develop modem technologies for HSPA+/LTE (Evolved High-Speed Packet Access / Long-Term Evolution) and its evolution. As [...]

More than 321 Million Handsets Shipped Globally in 2Q-2010

John Glossner — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:41:30 +0000

ABI reports Nokia continued to shed market share, declining to 34.5% Samsung was #2 LG notched up an increase in share to 9.5% RIM, with a 3.5% share Apple with a 2.6% share Motorola with a 2.6% share

4Q09 Smartphone Market Share

John Glossner — Mon, 10 May 2010 14:25:06 +0000

4Q09 smartphone and feature phone market share by vendor.

Handset supplier revenue change

John Glossner — Fri, 07 May 2010 14:21:14 +0000

Source: BoA, Merrill Lynch

Europe and US telecom capex

John Glossner — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:04:59 +0000

Source: Barclays The story is clearly different in the US, however, where both AT&T and Verizon Wireless are increasing spending materially this year. Verizon Wireless is only lifting capex by 5% despite embarking on its upgrade from CDMA EV-DO to LTE, indicating that the [...]

Average Capacity of a 14.4Mbps HSPA Cell

John Glossner — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:58:15 +0000

The analysis by Neu Mobile has demonstrated that as a result of varying conditions, the average capacity of an HSPA 14.4Mbps cell is only 1.8Mbps. This is based [...]

European Data ARPU vs GB/month

John Glossner — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:54:09 +0000

Source: Barclays

Connectivity Attach Rates

John Glossner — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:42:48 +0000

Estimated attach rates by connectivity standard.

Smartphones to grow but with steep ASP declines

John Glossner — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:36:17 +0000

Goldman Sachs predicts despite the pricing pressure on smartphones, new capabilities such as broadband internet browsing and satellite navigation with turn-by-turn directions mean new connectivity options must be added.

Baseband Unit Market Share

John Glossner — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:30:54 +0000

Broadcom is expected to gain while TI declines.

Broadcom Baseband Customer Ramp Estimates

John Glossner — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:30:05 +0000

Goldman Sach’s expects Broadcom’s mobile and wireless segment to remain the company’s most critical growth driver through 2011, and the most critical swing factor for the stock as well. Following a series of recent checks, we believe we now have better visibility on the ramp of Broadcom’s cellular business, and we forecast Broadcom’s baseband revenue [...]

ZTE Bumps Motorola

John Glossner — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:02:57 +0000

Anyone remember Siemens handsets…? Researcher iSuppli says ZTE broke into the top five handset makers while Moto slipped to No. 6. In much of the world, ZTE is better known as a maker of telecom networking equipment and data cards than cellphones. But research firm iSuppli says the Shenzhen-based technology company shipped enough [...]

FCC Okays Terrestrial LTE for SkyTerra

John Glossner — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:44:39 +0000

Daily wireles reports Infineon, SkyTerra, and TerreStar Networks are jointly developing a multi-standard mobile platform based on Infineon’s software-defined-radio (SDR) technology. Infineon’s SDR mobile platform, called XMM SDR 200, requires only one single baseband device, the X-GOLD™ SDR 20 and one single RF transceiver.

T-Mobile’s LT-Max

John Glossner — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:43:21 +0000

Daily Wireless has a nice article on LT-Max. Similar to the FCC’s “White Space” initiative, where television band spectrum can be used by unlicensed devices, the T-Mobile proposal, called LT-MAX, would merge the technology of White Spaces (“listen before transmit” and transmitter mapping), with Software Defined Radios that can change frequency and [...]

ARM boosted startup with Belgian DSP

John Glossner — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:39:42 +0000

The EE Times has a nice article on Cognovo. In November 2009, shortly after ARM (Cambridge, England) said it would close its DSP development operation in Heverlee, Belgium, Cognovo took on approximately half ARM’s Belgian contigent, according to a local report. In addition, ARM provided the vector signal processing IP developed there [...]

Term Sheet Provisions

John Glossner — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:59:39 +0000

A very nice post by Dave Broadwin at Foley Hoag on Term Sheet provisions. This is part 1 covering Dividends, Participating Preferred, Founder Representations, Option Vesting, Board of Directors, and Drag Along. See also the NVCA standard term sheet.

Smartphone OS Strategy

John Glossner — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:40:15 +0000

Source: Barclays Capital Perhaps a better approach to examine rather than trying to ascribe a specific strategic value to WebOS, is to examine the competitive landscape in order to assess which vendors could potentially utilize the asset. In our view, while we cannot shut out the possibility of any leading OEM being interested in Palm, we believe [...]

MediaTek 2G Market Share

John Glossner — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:22:55 +0000

Source: Morgan Stanley The key messages from management on 2G handsets were: 1. MediaTek believes the 2G export market is still significant as its market share in most EM markets outside of China is still below 30-35%, 2. The transition to SoC should reach cross over in shipments around mid-2010, 3. The company will layer [...]

CDMA/WCDMA Market Share

John Glossner — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:17:55 +0000

Source: Morgan Stanley

Qualcomm Chipset ASP

John Glossner — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:14:48 +0000

Source: Morgan Stanley Qualcomm reported a surprisingly weak FQ1 with even weaker FQ2 guidance as a lower ASPs for both handsets and chips drove revenue of $2,67B below our $2.77B estimate. Normalizing for $71M in out-of-period revenue boost from the new Samsung contract, “true” revenue of $2.6B was even lower, however within guidance of $2.55-2.75B.

iPad vs. Kindle and comparable devices

John Glossner — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:05:33 +0000

Source: Bernstein Research

Baseband Market Share by Revenue

John Glossner — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:29:42 +0000

Source: Merrill Lynch, BofA, IDC The exit of Freescale and TI has left the baseband market concentrated around six vendors: Qualcomm, Mediatek, Infineon, Marvell, ST-Ericsson and Broadcom. While we expect Qualcomm to further consolidate its high market share (through an increased presence at Motorola, share gains at Nokia), we believe that emerging vendors, namely Broadcom and Mediatek [...]

Smartphone Operating System Market Share

John Glossner — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:24:29 +0000

Source: Merrill Lynch BofA At the high level, we see stark differences between the strategies of Microsoft and Google. While Google provides the OS for free, aiming to move all services to the Cloud and trying to monetize via ad revenues and user information, Microsoft has tried to replicate its PC model and charge $15 – [...]

Wireless Innovation Forum Kicks Off Business Models For Open Source Air Interfaces

John Glossner — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:11:18 +0000

The working group I chair at the Wireless Innovation Forum, the Commercial Baseband Processing Technology Working Group, kicked off a new project investigating Business Models for Open Source Air Interfaces.

Smartphone Market by OEM

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:22:27 +0000

Source: BofA, Merrill Lynch From the perspective of unit shipments, last year (trailing twelve months or TTM) shipments of smartphones were 158.9mn, up 6% YoY, a sharp deceleration from the 22% growth in 2008. However we attribute this to the macro weakness. Nokia slightly lost share, down from 40% in 2008 to 39% in 2009e and down [...]

Smartphone and PC Shipment Trends

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:13:45 +0000

Merrill Lynch along with IDC and others:

IDC Smartphone Forecast

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:07:58 +0000

IDC (via Merrill Lynch) published the following estimate:

Android Surges Among Handset Purchasers

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:00:58 +0000

Between September and December 2009, the proportion of future smartphone buyers who planned to purchase an Android-based phone jumped from 6% to 21%.

Alcatel-Lucent introduces new converged radio technology that lets mobile service providers smoothly support any mix of 2G, 3G and 4G/LTE on the same network

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:44:40 +0000

Multi-technology radio module can be introduced in more than 700,000 Alcatel-Lucent based stations already installed worldwide, enabling a gradual shift from GSM to W-CDMA and LTE Paris, February 4, 2010 – Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced the introduction of a new radio module, based on software defined radio (SDR) technology, that gives mobile [...]

mimoOn and Tensilica to Provide Low Power, Small Footprint and Programmable IP Solutions for Mobile Wireless Radios

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:58:31 +0000

DUISBURG, GERMANY– February 10, 2010 -mimoOn, a pioneer in LTE software implementations for programmable radio platforms, and Tensilica® Inc., a leader in programmable and efficient IP cores for advanced mobile wireless SOCs (system-on-chips), today announced a partnership to offer best-in-class LTE solutions for mobile wireless radios based on mimoOn’s mi!MobilePHY™ software and Tensilica’s newly announced [...]

mimoOn demonstrates LTE for pico base stations based on Texas Instruments’ DSPs

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:56:39 +0000

Duisburg, Germany – 9 February, 2010 – mimoOn, a pioneer in LTE software implementation for programmable radio platforms, announced that it will be demonstrating LTE for pico base stations at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona next week. mimoOn will showcase its advanced LTE PHY implementation running on TI’s DSPs, February 15-18, 2010, in the [...]

mimoOn & CEVA to demonstrate Single-Core, Real-time LTE UE Platform

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:53:31 +0000

mimoOn, a pioneer in LTE software implementation for programmable radio platforms, and CEVA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEVA); (LSE: CVA), the leading licensor of silicon intellectual property (SIP) platform solutions and DSP cores, today announced a joint demonstration of a complete LTE UE PHY platform at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The demo will exhibit an end-to-end [...]

mimoOn to demonstrate its advanced low-cost LTE Test Mobile for Digital Dividend at Mobile World Congress 2010

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:48:18 +0000

Duisburg, Germany – 4 February, 2010: mimoOn, a pioneer in LTE software implementations for programmable radio platforms, announced it would demonstrate its LTE Test Mobile mi!TestMOBILE™ for the new European Digital Dividend (DD) frequencies at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. The demo can be seen on the mimoOn stand 2B17. The DD spectrum at [...]

Multimode vector radio dismantles barriers to SDR software portability

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:35:36 +0000

My friends at Sigmatix and Octoscope have a nice follow-on EE Times article about Vector SDRs. The original article (mentioning Sandbridge) is here. As an excerpt: To ensure the cost reduction of SDR platforms via economies of scale, software portability across processors must be achieved. The new generation of SDR, called multimode vector radio (MVR), offers that [...]

Army’s New “Smart Radio” May Revolutionize Communications

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:26:31 +0000

Armed with Science reports engineers with the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy are working to build a so-called “universal radio” test-bed this year in Fort Monmouth, N.J. They hope to open the gates of “cognitive radio” development to academia, private industry and other Defense Department organizations. The Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) is creating [...]

Tensilica Introduces ConnX Atlas Reference Architecture for LTE

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:08:35 +0000

Multi-Standard Programmable Radio Platform Also Supports Other Standards Including HSPA+ SANTA CLARA, Calif. – February 8, 2010 -Tensilica, Inc. today introduced its ConnX Atlas LTE (Long-Term Evolution) reference platform, a heterogeneous seven-core reference architecture for a complete multi-standard programmable radio for advanced mobile devices. Atlas is designed to support the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) LTE [...]

Tensilica Introduces Second Generation ConnX BaseBand Engine DSP

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:05:34 +0000

Performance Improvements Up to 3x Over ConnX Baseband Engine Introduced in June 2009 SANTA CLARA, Calif. – February 8, 2010 – Tensilica, Inc. today introduced ConnX BBE16, its second generation baseband engine for LTE (long-term evolution) and 4G baseband SOC (system-on-chip) designs. ConnX BBE16’s 16-way MAC (multiply accumulator) architecture is optimized for the most demanding wireless [...]

Octasic Announces Second Generation DSP Core For Cutting-Edge Wireless and Media Gateway Applications

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:57:14 +0000

Octasic provides Opus2 DSP Core Development Environment for evaluation by 3G/4G wireless product designers… MONTREAL, Canada – February 8, 2010 – Octasic Inc., a leading innovator of media processing and wireless solutions, today announced its second generation Opus2 DSP core, a high-performance, ultra-low power, asynchronous DSP architecture optimized for baseband processing and multimedia transcoding. To facilitate [...]

Octasic and Continuous Computing to Demonstrate UMTS Femtocell / Picocell Platform at Mobile World Congress 2010

John Glossner — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:51:01 +0000

Smooth Interworking of Trillium® Software with Vocallo BTS Baseband Processor Helps Accelerate Product Development by Small Cell Equipment Providers MONTREAL, Quebec, Canada and SAN DIEGO – February 8, 2010 – Octasic Inc., a leading innovator of wireless and media processing solutions, and Continuous Computing®, the global provider of hardware and software solutions that address the mobile [...]

Network Performance – or when is a hub better than a switch?

John Glossner — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:02:27 +0000

Today is one of those crazy days where my network can not even seem to sustain a voip call. Frankly this really annoys me so I decided to debug my network. Recently I upgraded my home office to a business class cable modem with 5/22Mbps service. Simultaneously with that (yes, unadvised in any network deployment) [...]