TI sees $20 mobile phones out this year
Texas Instruments (TI), the world’s largest maker of chips for mobile phones, believes a GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) handset costing as little as $20 could be available by the end of this year as part of the drive to provide ultra-low-cost phones to people in poor nations.
The company plays a vital role in determining handset costs because it makes the most expensive part of a mobile phone, the chips that run them. To reduce handset costs, TI combined the jobs of four chips onto a single chip, reducing the amount of material needed to make the handset.
Nokia was among the first handset manufacturers to adopt TI’s single-chip product in early 2005. Since then, TI developed a more standard single chip product for the broader market named “LoCosto“, which a number of mobile phone developers have signed up to use, including TCL Communication Technology Holdings and other Chinese handset makers, said Desmond Wong, a TI spokesman based in Shanghai.
“We have a roadmap to further reduce overall system costs,” he added.
The drive to create ultra-low-cost mobile phones for poor nations has been championed by the GSM Association (GSMA), an industry group that includes companies from throughout the telecommunications sector. The handsets are aimed at the over 1 billion people in emerging market nations such as Bangladesh, China, India, and Russia that lack the money to purchase conventional mobile phones. In fact, while around 80 percent of the world’s population has wireless coverage, only about 20 percent subscribe to mobile services, largely because of the cost of mobile phones, according to the GSMA. Via InfoWorld
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[…] Motorola has become the first manufacturer to come out with a cell phone which makes use of the new ‘LoCosto’ chip. The LoCosto chip from Texas Instruments, is a low cost chip and is the industry’s first architecture to provide single-chip solutions from ultra-low to entry-range wireless handsets. “LoCosto” combines the radio and all the baseband processing into one highly integrated solution, reducing component count, board space, power consumption and system cost. For the first time, wireless handsets can be made as compact as match boxes and inexpensively enough to open up entire new markets around the world.Motorola has launched the GSM based W220 , based on this chipset in Taiwan for NT$4,880 (US$150). Amongst its features from which MP3 player and camera are not present , the only thing worth mention would be the FM radio presence. Compal Communications will ship CDMA handsets (W170 and W210) and GSM handsets (W208 and W375) that incorporate the LoCosto chips to Motorola in the second half of this year, sources said. The W170 model will be volume produced in the third quarter, with the rest to be rolled out in the fourth quarter, the sources added. […]
August 19th, 2006 at 8:09 am