Instrumental to chip success
Published: 02 Sep 2005 11:05 BST
being a secret. Wireless-handset sales are estimated to probably be 750m units this year, and that's four times the personal computer market. Wireless users globally are 2bn subscribers by the end of this year, and you can find researchers or forecasters who are saying that could come to 4bn... in another four years.
But understanding where the market is going and participating in it are two different things. We were fortunate enough to be involved in DSPs 25 years ago and in analogueue very early on. We have deep customer relationships, we have deep system skills, and we know how to bring all these capabilities together.
Take Intel. In the handset market — despite pretty aggressive investment and pretty strong claims — they've had pretty limited progress to date on that product.
If you just look back at the broader landscape, leaders in one era generally struggle to try to transform themselves to put together back-to-back leadership eras. And this comes from Texas Instruments. If you go back, we had a leadership era coming out of the '50s and into the '60s with the integrated circuit and into early LSI. And we know who won the PC era. I think we are off to a very good start, a very good opening position [in communications]. But you know that being off to a good start really does matter here.
Intel has been working to build more of the parts that surround the microprocessor. Do you expect TI to do the same, to the same degree?
Past tense. If you looked at a mobile phone seven to eight years ago, it probably had 20 to 25 ICs inside. You take a look at a configuration a year ago, and we probably had that down to two or three or four main ICs. We started sampling to Nokia a single-chip mobile phone. We've now actually integrated the Digital RF and the radio functions onto the same DSP base band along with the power management.
What is the mobile phone industry talking about? We began this year with 3G. In the second quarter, we started hearing the Nokias and the Motorolas talking about the high growth of the low-end phone market, meaning sub-$40, sub-$30. If you want to go deeper into India, if you want to go deeper into China, you don't do it with a $150 phone. You do it with a $30 phone. What we'll be doing with this single-chip solution is driving the ability to design and manufacture ultra-low cost phones. I think you're going to find...
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