Mobile World Congress, Barcelona – Day 3: Less wires = wireless February 23, 2010
Posted by jstahl09 in Uncategorized.Tags: ARM, AT&T, CEVA, DSP, Facebook, Mobile, Windows Mobile, WIPRO, Wireless
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The Barcelona sun finally starts to arrive and helps to put the serious business being conducted here into a supportive environment. The best deals are being cut at the outside coffee table. The forward looking roadmap conversations happen by sitting together on the fountain walls.
Mobile is a massive business. Indian software services company WIPRO employs about 1,100 engineers in the mobile practice software services alone. As their general manager Arvind Jayabal points out they prefer doing their work in the fully green oriented WIPRO facilities rather than being forced to work at their international customers facilities. One forcing function for that is the infrastructure to develop software, like specific development board, which may only be available in limited quantities and locations. Virtualization of electronic platforms should be able to solve this problem soon.
Not less massive – from a booth perspective – is the appearance of Microsoft’s new Windows Mobile OS. Even on day 3 a faithful crowd of visitors listen to what the moderator has to say about the great features of managing your social life. You can aggregate all of your friend’s data from your own address book, calendar and FaceBook. Looks very cool. Many people are listening to this while happily typing an e-mail on their Blackberry or checking FaceBook on their iPhones….
Mobile video remains an interesting topic throughout the show. CEVA showcases their newest flagship, dual core DSP. The two DSPs are actually performing different tasks within video processing and have been optimized for those using the latest processor design technologies in this area. The CEVA CTO, Erez Barniv, points out proudly that a full rate 1080p HD video can run on an FPGA implementation of their DSP at just 50 MHz clock speed. This provides a promising outlook to using this new core for actual handset chips. DSP industry analyst Will Strauss stops at the demo and is significantly impressed by the technology as well.
Cambridge based mobile IP leader ARM is presenting several netbook products in their booth. More and more of their Chinese customers require them to predict performance for a specific set of target product constraints. ARM is addressing this through their sophisticated traffic generation tools combined with their partners providing the exploration and modeling technologies for ARM’s interconnects. They also point out that significant breakthroughs on the software side are necessary to keep their Santa Clara competitor on a distance in their home market. “They told us, before you can do Flash, you can’t sell real computers. Now we have it. What is their next challenge?”
The green topic in terms of power consumption continues in the infrastructure market. If you are dialing 911 from your cell phone in the US your location information should better be true. TruePosition is the provider of pizza box sized electronics that AT&T and T-Mobile are putting on their basestation towers to calculate your position from relaying several basestation measurement data. Many of these types of infrastructure systems are today being implemented using a combination of FPGAs and DSPs. The race for getting all the ‘green content’ is on between the TI and Freescale and Xilinx and Altera. In the end only the innovation of the system OEMs to advanced algorithms, software implementation, hardware implementation or custom processor design is making the green difference. The semiconductor companies just deliver the basic ingredients.
Away from the business discussion into the consumer view again one booth caught a significant attention, mostly because of clever marketing. The booth for “Powermat” was entire closed with the exception of a small entrance where customer had to line up for badge scanning. The process was deliberately slow, so a busy line would form. The product concept? Put your Smartphone into an additional protection sleeve that contains a power plug and a wireless charging device. Carry around a much bulkier phone all day so that when you come home you can just drop it on the Powermat, where it charges. Spend lots of dollars on ‘new sleeves’ for each of your device and discard the included charged from your device. If they can stay in business until the phone manufacturers will include the technology into the standard phone package this maybe interesting.
In the end business managers return satisfied from the show. It is a worthwhile concentration of decision makers in the industry. They have their calendars marked for 2011 already.
Mobile World Congress, Barcelona – Day 2: Performance and cost – it’s a stretch February 20, 2010
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Orientation on the second day is a lot easier. Enter hall 8 where the titans of the industry play. Make a right at docomo, go straight to Research in Motion and head straight into leader Nokia? Hold on, Nokia was not exhibiting this year at the event! They offered a comfortable Rikscha ride from the Fira to their meeting place. Even though they refrained from the race to show new hardware, they made a significant software announcement with Intel to merge their Linux efforts into one. This again underpins Intel being serious about their Atom strategy for the mobile market.
So what was the stretch in this day? It was the low-end to high-end stretch. On the high end you would find small software players such as a Swedish company, Ikivo, specializing in high performance user interfaces for selecting from your address book or list of songs. Or specialized IP companies like Chips & Media from Korea producing high performance video IP. Of course the big semiconductor companies play in the performance game, such as TI with their OMAP processors. You wouldn’t expect that this processing power is actually needed to drive something as simple looking as an eBook reader, where the display update speed for the sophisticated low power displays is heavily influenced by the digital signal processing done by the processor. What do all of these examples have in common? It’s the combination of performance of software and hardware. It is critical for this industry to optimize both. Many times it can be done using virtualization technologies sometimes it will require additional subjective testing for the final selection as well.
On the low-end Vodafone announced the $20 retail phone (note – this is without subsidies). Customers can do voice and SMS with it. Imagine the amount of hardware optimization that will produce silicon at that cost level. Not only phones need to be extremely cheap to serve the underdeveloped areas, the network infrastructure needs to very affordable as well. Indian developer VNL demonstrated the low cost, rural area GSM infrastructure, which is using solar powered repeaters to get the GSM signal out into the country side. They are able to provide network operators with revenue even at ARPU of $2. Here the simulation of the physical layer for GSM is critical as it determines how far the operator can stretch the equipment. The chairman of the company told me that a local team of construction people can put the battery, solar and antenna on a roof top in just under 4 hours.
If you think the hardware and software content solely drive the technology edge, Samsung proves that you are mistaken. Their ‘Wave’ phone displays the brightest color with the lowest reflection and the easiest touch in the industry. It doesn’t look like they will license their ‘super-AMOLED’ technology anytime soon to their Cupertino based Smartphone competitor.
Mobile World Congress, Barcelona – Day 1: It’s the capacity stupid! February 16, 2010
Posted by jstahl09 in Uncategorized.Tags: AT&T, Avatar, docomo, Dolby, ESV, Femtocells, Interdigital, Mobile, software, Verizon, Vodafone, Xilinx
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For those US visitors that came to the Fira de Barcelona this year with the blurred vision from comparing coverage maps in the never ending Verizon vs. AT&T commercials, they were up for a surprise! Vodaphone, the European operator counterpart, is much less embarrassed to push Femtocells as the recipe against missing coverage. Of course all of us in the software industry have known this trick for years, turning a bug into a feature.
This year’s MWC event is again the marketplace for the mobile world of tomorrow. 45,000+ attendees are lining up in front of the newest gadgets and applications (and the spare foodcourts). One would think that the most useful innovations are the software applications, such as the next Dolby implementation for mobile devices demonstrated in comfortable chairs playing Avatar trailers. The most eye popping innovation today actually was the concept demo from Japanese leader docomo. They showed a headset picking up the eye movements of the user to control the connected audio device operation. There was still room for improvement though as the poor Japanese engineer demonstrating it had to work pretty hard with his eyes. A lot more pleasant to look at was the concept packaging for the next generation phones from docomo. It was a handy roundish shape and it was made out of spare wood produced as a natural product of thinning out the Japanese forests. Already today you can buy ‘the leaf’, a biodegradable protection for your iPhone, made in green Ireland. It will disappear in your backyard in 1-5 years – but don’t try this with your iPhone itself.
Let’s come back to the capacity question. Aditya Kaul from ABI research was hired by the Femtocell Forum to present on trends for these new pieces of infrastructure that today help out operators with coverage, but could become the panacea for their capacity problem. From today until 2015 it is predicted that the gap between peak and average capacity offered by the basestations deployed will increase 90-fold. That means for people living in dense areas, they may show five bars of signal strength on their Smartphones, but they will never get their 1080p movie to upload to their FaceBook page because of lacking local network capacity. For 2010 ABI predicts only 1,000,000 units of Femtocells shipped world-wide, but this number may need to increase dramatically.
Another way of increasing the capacity is being demonstrated by the wireless patent producer Interdigital Communications. Their VP Air Interface and RF Systems, Ariela Zeira, explains at their booth about advanced handover using ‘fuzzy cells’ or traffic aggregation mixing cellular and WiFi transports to maximize bandwidth.
Also Xilinx is happily positioning their LTE Targeted Design Platform for the entire range of eNodeB designs including Femtocells. If you walk onto their booth and get a demonstration of their reference design they will point out that “you will not find a DSP as part of our solution, it is all being done with IP implemented in Virtex-6”. I kind of expected that, but was disappointed not to see a power meter for their solution, which would have put their product right into the context of the other green solutions I mentioned before.
Finally the participants are not greeted by a green, warm spring. Coming in transit from the winter-stricken Germany, I had hoped for something much better. Well, back into the busy halls of the MWC then, tomorrow.
