Half-a-dozen Asian mobile phone vendors, carriers, and chipmakers will jointly develop an HSDPA-capable 2G/3.5G mobile phone hardware/software reference design. NTT DoCoMo, Renesas, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi Electric, Sharp, and Sony Ericsson say collaborating on a common, basic phone platform will help them invest more time and resources in developing distinctive handset features.

The jointly developed reference design will run open OSes “such as Symbian,” the companies say, among other “standard OSes” — presumably alluding to Linux and/or Windows Mobile. One of the companies — NTT DoCoMo — recently co-founded the LiMo Foundation, tasked with building a common Linux software platform under an interesting Foundation Public License.

The companies say their jointly developed phone design will be based on a third-generation SH-Mobile multiprocessor chip. The SH-Mobile G3 chip integrates an SH4-based application processor along with a cellular baseband processor, on the same die.

SH Mobile G3 reference design block diagram
The SH-Mobile G3's baseband function appears to support both GSM/GPRS/EDGE 2/2.5G networks and HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access) cat. 82/W-CDMA 3G networks. Under the latter, the design will eventually be capable of transmission speeds of up to 7.2Mbps, pending infrastructure rollouts, the companies say.

The companies promise the SH-Mobile G3 processor will deliver high-end multimedia, and that the phone design will integrate audio, power, and RF front-end circuits. Also planned is a common software reference implementation for basic functions, along with device drivers, middleware, and communication software. Application software will not be part of the basic design.

NTT DoCoMo and Renesas previously collaborated on an SH-Mobile G1 reference design, said to be in mass production now, with the first handsets having appeared last fall. Additionally, the present group of collaborators is said to be working now on the software component of a G2 design expected to ship in phones this fall.

Availability

The SH Mobile G3 design is expected to reach worldwide availability between July and September, 2008.

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