BARCELONA, Spain — Texas Instruments has unveiled the main elements of its OMAP 3 architecture for mobile phones centered around an applications processor that will be the first to use ARM’s Cortex-A8 superscalar technology and one of the first to be made using a 65-nm process.
Unveiled Tuesday (Feb. 14) at the 3GSM World Congress here, TI predicted its third iteration of the OMAP platform would transform the mobile phone into a personal and professional tool that allows consumers to integrate work and entertainment into one device.
The first device for the platform, the OMAP 3430 multimedia processor, is expected to be sampling in mid-2006 and enter volume production next year.
"We're taking the applications processor to another level," said TI CEO Richard Templeton. "The cellphone is a device that people can't do without and we're now adding features such as multithreading so they can do multiple things at the same—but with higher performance and lower power. It's a whole new class."
Aside from the use of the latest in microprocessor and DSP technology, Templeton pointed to the use of advanced software architectures "to keep them fed."
According to Templeton, OMAP 3 will be the highest featured product announcement at the conference, though he also pointed to advances in gaming toward standard interfaces and gaming platforms, as well as more announcements concerning the company's single-chip GSM phone.
Predicted at 3GSM three years ago, the single-chip phone emerged in early 2005. Now, according to Templeton, the low-cost device will "help GSM become the dominant standard of choice." At the same time, he believes the Digital RF Processing technology behind the chip will also enable converged devices, starting, for example, with wireless LAN and Bluetooth.
"It’s a huge step up in performance and low power capability, with for instance a 30 percent power savings compared to OMAP 2 processors, and will enable parallel applications through the support of 12 megapixel image capture with less than a second shoot-to-shoot delay," Richard Kerslake, worldwide general manager of the OMAP platform business told EE Times .
“Many of the technical aspects of the processor and OMAP 3 architecture are as a result of feedback from customers of what they want to see in 3G phones of the future, and these early adopters will be getting engineering samples in a few months,” said Kerslake. Nokia and Sony Ericsson are amongst the biggest users of the previous OMAP platforms, as are many Japanese manufacturers.
