Nokia's vice president of strategic and external affairs painted an optimistic demand picture for chips used in a range of mobile devices from simple cellphones to full multifunctional, integrated phones.

"The lines are blurring among consumer electronics, communications, information technology and media and content," Plummer said here Tuesday (July 12) at Semicon West 2005. The industry has a ways to go before seamless delivery of content among devices occurs, but he said the demand exists.

"It's not enough to place a camera into a phone," said Plummer. "What you want is to manipulate those images and distribute them to others as soon as you can." For that to happen, much more memory and software needs to be added, requiring more chips in each mobile device.

Chips are needed as image sensors, main and application processors, radio, baseband circuit and memory.

So far, about 600 million Nokia phones have been sold to subscribers, according to Plummer.

Worldwide, some 2 billion cellphones will be in people's hands in 2005 and 3 billion by 2010. "This year the industry will have reached a 28-percent penetration subscriber rate globally," said Plummer. "Not all users will require the latest model. A lot of them will be with monochrome screens."

Although the Symbian operating system developed specifically for portable devices has served Nokia well, he said future cellphones may need a different operating system to accommodate multiradio functionality and the multiple cellular protocols.

By: DocMemory
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