05 June 2008

Freescale shows DIY S60 handset kit

The changing nature of the mobile handset industry was brought home to the INQ here at the S60 Summit by Freescale.

The company wasn't just showing off its chipset but offering a complete DIY S60 handset kit.

Reference designs are commonplace but Freescale has actually ported the complete S60 system to its latest chipsets. A handset vendor would have to add very little to arrive at a working handset.

Freescale told the INQ that it was currently in discussions with a major handset vendor but could make no design win announcement until the handset itself was launched some time in Q3-Q4 2008.

"We are proud to collaborate with Symbian and Nokia to make life easier for our OEM's engineering teams," said Tom Deitrich, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale's Cellular Products Group. "Our MXC architecture allows them to provide more high-end multimedia features desired by consumers with a low bill of materials, fewer parts, lower power consumption and greater performance."

Freescale Semiconductor continues to enhance the first 3G mobile phone reference design using Freescale's Mobile eXtreme Convergence (MXC) architecture combined with S60 and Symbian OS. Based on a significant joint investment, the collaboration offers both mature and newly introduced reference design solutions, which reduce cost and time-to-market.

Freescale, Nokia and Symbian created the first HSDPA mobile phone reference design using Freescale's MXC. The reference design has developed into a mature solution addressing upper low-tier and mid-tier 3G market segments.

The solution, running both S60 3rd Edition Feature Packs 1 and Feature Packs 2 on Symbian OS, has the ability to reduce device development time by up to 50 percent. The reference design is based on Freescale's MXC architecture, which integrates an applications processor in the baseband while maintaining clean separation from the modem. This eliminates an extra processor and a second memory subsystem, therefore enabling low-cost designs.