Date: 13/02/2009

Mobile phone chip for mass smart phone market

The smartphone is turning into a handheld laptop with interesting computing features. Its becoming mainstream phone with even an average user preferring a smartphone but at lower price. The price tag now is $150 for mass used smart phone. Qualcomm is targeting this market by sampling new Mobile Station Modem (MSM) MSM7227 chipset designed to enable high-performance, sub-$150 Smartphones. The MSM7227 solution will feature HSDPA/HSUPA for high-speed broadband connectivity over 3G networks. It's designed to support popular mobile operating systems such as Android, Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and BREW Mobile Platform.

"We see a significant opportunity to bring the best features of today's Smartphones to the mass-market segment," said Alex Katouzian, vice president of product management, Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. "Our new MSM7227 chipset offers manufacturers an attractive blend of performance and price, software re-use from the prior MSM7xxx-series products, and support for the industry's leading mobile operating systems."

The new MSM7227 chipset features a 600 MHz applications processor with a floating point unit, 320 MHz application DSP, 400 MHz modem processor, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, integrated Bluetooth 2.1 and GPS, 8 megapixel camera and 30 fps WVGA video encode and decode and display support. Manufacturers already using Qualcomm's MSM7xxx-series chipsets can transit easily to the MSM7227 platform as the software is virtually identical and the package pin layout is very similar. The MSM7227 chipset offers a small 12mm x 12mm footprint and lower power consumption than the previous MSM7xxx-series chips.

The MSM7227 chipset based Smartphones are expected to hit the market by later this year.