Single-chip baseband cellular ICs from Intel and Samsung will storm into the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, next week. The two parts should usher in a major round of new designs in the nascent smartphone segment, where vendors have struggled to combine prime-time features and small form-factors in early generation models such as Thera and Orange.

News of the Intel part, code-named “Manitoba,” was first reported by Rick Merritt in EE Times. He writes that Manitoba combines 16 MBytes of flash, a 400 MHz XScale processor and a 400 MHz Analog Devices Inc.-style digital single processor.

But Intel, which will be fielding its first single-chip IC specifically for cellular, won't go unchallenged. As we've previously reported, Samsung will be introducing its own ARM-based single-chip cellphone IC.

The Samsung “System-In-Package” component is based on an ARM920T CPU core operating at 203 MHz. It includes 256MB of NAND Flash and 256MB of SDRAM memory.

Both the Intel and Samsung parts will be able to support embedded Linux and other operating systems.

— by Alexander Wolfe, executive editor of WindowsForDevices.com.

 
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