Phone platforms
Icera is working with leading applications processor companies to deliver a range of HSPA phone platforms from connected media players, to feature phones and smartphones.
Icera’s Livanto® wireless soft modem is enabling a new, open architecture for HSPA phones. With Livanto delivering a high performance, pure modem function, multimedia and applications processing is concentrated into a separate applications processor delivering either high-end functionality or a targeted, vertical market focused, media capability. Using a separate applications processor also allows open operating systems to be easily supported.
Today only a very limited number of solutions exist for building HSPA phones. In these solutions the HSPA function has been added to an existing 3G baseband chip with a media capability that does not meet the broadband cellular market requirement. As a result, either the platform is compromised on media performance or additional media accelerators are required.
The lack of competition is allowing conventional baseband chip suppliers to demand high prices for an inflexible platform that will not scale for new modem requirements or for new media requirements.
Faced with both a fast changing applications space and fast evolving modem requirement, the conventional baseband architecture needs to change. With Icera, a real alternative exists for HSPA phones in 2007 and beyond.
