By Gilles Delfassy, Manager,
Famed football coach Vince Lombardi once said, "Winning isn't
everything, it's the only thing." In the wireless communications
arena, Texas Instruments has taken Lombardi's philosophy to heart.
We intend to be the world's leading source of semiconductors for
wireless communications by the year 2000 and through decades to
come. Nothing less will do.
The reasons for TI's commitment to wireless communications are simple. The industry represents a large market today and promises to become gargantuan by the end of this decade. Projections suggest that cellular telephone makers will sell some 40 million units in 1995. That number will grow to more than 100 million in 1999.
With the growth in sales of cellular phones will come increasing demand for powerful, inexepensive, battery-saving integrated circuits that are the guts of digital cellular systems. From a total of about $1.5 billion this year, semiconductor sales to cellular telephone manufacturers will climb to $7 billion to $10 billion by the year 2000.
To win in this emerging market, TI has developed core competencies that fit together into total solutions for wireless OEMs and service providers. Not only do we manufacture the semiconductors that digital cellular phones and base stations require, we also offer the system and software expertise that equipment makers need to satisfy consumer expectations.
Our leadership in high-performance, low-power Digital Signal Processors (DSP), the processing muscle in most digital cellular phones, is well-established. But a complete cellular solution also requires dense, low-power ASIC backplane technology, world-class mixed-signal devices and RF capabilities for power and small signal.
In all of these categories, TI offers products tailored specifically to the needs of the wireless communications industry. Not only do we provide one-chip solutions through the recently introduced TMS320C54x generation of devices, we also license software to support major communications protocols in use around the world (See GSM modules).
Just as important, TI recently developed a new business model to help our customers get the most from our semiconductors and our expertise in order to design new products and get them to market faster. With our new wireless communications business unit, we put everything that relates to the wireless communications industry together under one umbrella. We make sure our components complement each other, and we try to make it easy for customers to determine the TI hardware/software solution that can best serve their specific design.
More channels in limited bandwidth is a major concern for equipment makers and service providers. This need is driving the move away from analog and toward digital cellular phones. TI has responded with DSPs optimized for signal compression and software modules for half-rate GSM powerful enough to implement enhanced full-rate standards as well.
Low cost is vital to consumers, and TI has long been the price/performance leader in DSP technology. Equipment size and weight are also consumer care-abouts, but it is only the distance from a person's ear to the mouth that limits progress here. TI's integrated solutions make it possible to design cellular phones much smaller than a normal person could use.
The biggest concern among consumers is battery life. Cellular users want more talk time and more stand-by time. TI devices address this concern in three ways:
First, TI DSPs are moving to ever lower voltages. Along with standard 5-V devices, our company offers 3-V chips, and we are moving toward 2 V, 1 V and less. Power-down modes further reduce power consumption and extend battery life.
Second, architecture of the TI's TMS320C54x allow a single-cycle execution of a set of functions that might take three clock ticks with other processors. Fewer instructions for a given function mean less power consumption.
Finally, increased integration means fewer components, and that results in less power use, too. TI recently introduced the first single-DSP implementation of the half-rate GSM standard (See GSM modules).
If you design wireless communications equipment, TI can help you come up with the right product at the right price and get it to consumers quickly. TI is playing to win in wireless communications.
October 1995, vol. 12, no. 7