NEW YORK-Texas Instruments Inc. has put its money where its mouth is to support Internet content providers, whose creativity and innovation it sees as critical for sustaining and expanding the wireless telecommunications revolution.
“That is why [the company] is investing $100 million in a technology development fund-to encourage such third-party players to develop new applications for [digital signal processor] technology,” said Christian Dupont, director of the America’s for TI’s Wireless Communications Business Unit, Dallas.
Wireless telecommunications has the potential to follow a different and more lucrative trajectory than other kinds of consumer electronics, like calculators, televisions or videocassette recorders.
“We have all seen the classic trends … A new device is invented. Sales ramp up, and then the market saturates. Growth rates level off. Before long, the business … becomes a price play, and competitors struggle to keep their products from becoming commodities,” Dupont said in a keynote address to the Wireless Symposium in Santa Clara, Calif., in February.
“The growth curve of [the wireless industry] can continue along a much more robust path, especially if we take a strategic approach to developing our next-generation systems. (It is also) the very nature of communications to feed on itself. Wireless phones do not make wireline phones obsolete. If anything, wireless technology creates more demand and more types of demand for service providers.”
Last year, for the first time, shipments of digital cellular phones surpassed those of personal computers. The forecasts are that shipments of these wireless handsets will grow another 45 percent, to 125 million phones, by the end of this year, he said.
Despite the phenomenal growth in wireless communications during the past decade, boom times in the industry probably still lie in the future. This exciting prospect also poses an enormous challenge because it implies a dramatic transition from voice-only communications available most anywhere to secure and clear multimedia communications available everywhere.
“In short, tomorrow’s wireless systems and equipment will seem less like discrete islands of technology and more like integrated tools for doing all the different types of communication people need … every day,” Dupont said.
“In order to capture all the growth … available to us, in order to stay relevant in a rapidly changing marketplace, we will have to reinvent the way we do business. And we will have to do it while continuing to run an industry that is growing at the torrid pace of 45 percent a year.”
Therefore, a unified move toward flexibility, scalability and programmability will be necessary among all wireless industry players, including carriers, handset manufacturers and semiconductor suppliers.
“We will have to start thinking about building systems and [end-user] equipment … capable of handling a range of personal communications tasks.
“One approach … is to rely on software … Advanced functionality will not be built into every phone, (but) instead come … downloaded from the network (because) tomorrow’s users will want to be able to configure and reconfigure their [wireless devices] in an endless variety of ways.”
The new software applications developers, which Texas Instruments seeks to support with its development fund, would benefit from the entree afforded them by this more flexible and scalable approach to systems design. In turn, these software companies would provide carriers and original equipment manufacturers a variety of features and service offerings by which to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.
Dupont said Texas Instruments supplied the DSP’s used in 50 million of the 86 million digital cellular phones manufactured last year. A combination of DSPs and software offer flexibility in various aspects of wireless communications, like: permitting the handset to work on several standards; providing the potential for software rather than hard wiring to provide radio-frequency solutions; delivering coding algorithms for high-quality voice communications; offering the processing power necessary for speech recognition features such as voice-activated dialing; deploying the mathematical processes necessary for encryption codes; offering image and video capabilities, an early use of digital signal processor technology in the 1980s.
“Our goal should be simple: To adopt technology strategies and standards that put no limits on the number and type of value-added services which can emerge over the next decade … It will require the industry to make unprecedented improvements in network quality, bandwidth utilization and (end-user) equipment performance.
“It will require, too, a new level of openness with respect to the sources of innovation. No [single] player or group of players has what it takes to get the job done on its own. Not the service providers. Not the base station and network designers. Not the OEMs. Not the semiconductor industry. Not the third-party developers and content providers.”
