The cellphone today is burdened by having to support multiple wireless communications standards, and the situation is growing worse, according to market research firm ABI Research, which has just launched a wireless semiconductor research service. Today's mobile phone supports multiple cellular standards such as GPRS, EDGE and UMTS, and it may also have a personal area network (PAN) technology such as Bluetooth. But, according to ABI, “the number of radios in a cellphone is set to rise exponentially in the quest to make the handset a multifunction, multimode communications, information and entertainment device.”

The mobile phone of the future, according to ABI, will incorporate GPS for location based services, FM radio and broadcast/satellite based television for entertainment, various flavors of Wi-Fi, and eventually WiMAX for data and VoIP communications. "It may also include Near Field Communications (NFC), Ultrawideband (UWB), radio frequency identification (RFID), and maybe even Zigbee," the company suggested. "The challenges of including the circuitry to support all these functions in the limited size of a handset are obvious."

In the light of these and other trends, ABI's wireless semiconductor research service examines the technology and market for cellphone ICs such as power amplifiers, RF transceivers, applications processors, camera modules and newer modules such as Wi-Fi and GPS, and it also focuses on the deployment of EDGE, 3G cellular, and HSDPA worldwide. The service, further, will attempt to answer a number of critical questions.

“Do some of these technologies solve the same problems, and will they consolidate?" asks Alan Varghese, principal analyst of semiconductor research at ABI. "Can they work within the handset's small form factor and limited battery capacity? What about heat dissipation, antenna placement, interference and last but not least, price?”

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.