Semiconductor Enabled Mobile Internet
The mobile internet market will be the single biggest semiconductor innovation driver in the coming decade. The technology required to continually integrate electronic devices into a single handset is daunting. The amounts of information that will need to be retrieved, processed, stored, and displayed will be catastrophic. Reference the Morgan Stanley Mobile Internet Report.
I touched on this subject in my blog Semiconductor IP Innovation and the mention of the Mobile Industry Processor Interface or MIPI as it is affectionately referred to. The semiconductor industry has done a decent job with industry standards which allow consumers like myself a choice of vendors for leading edge mobile technologies.
Next month brings the premier exhibition for mobile internet devices. The Mobile World Congress is the combination of the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile industry and a congress featuring prominent Chief Executives representing mobile operators, vendors and content owners from across the world. CEO Keynote Speakers this year include one of my favorites Eric Schmidt of Google. The CEOs this year will offer their views of the new mobile landscape, sharing perspectives and insights that serve to strengthen and advance the industry. This conference was first held in 1987 and attracts 50,000+ attendees. Follow me to Barcelona Spain via Twitter: DanielNenni
Semiconductor design enablement is represented at the Mobile World Congress by the top IP companies ARM, Virage Logic and MIPS. Even an EDA company (Mentor Graphics) is exhibiting this year. The MIPI Alliance Zone will be in Hall 2 (2H41) with Silicon Valley companies leading the way. At the physical interface layer there is Mixel, the leader in SERDES/PHY MIPI technology. At the controller level there is Virage Logic and Arasan. Virage licensed the MIPI controller from the AMD-ATI group last year and markets complete IP solutions that include embedded processors (ARC), embedded memories, and interface IP. Arasan “The Bus Stops Here” provides MIPI, I/O, and storage IP.
Currently the MIPI standard uses D-PHY technology with communication speeds of 500M-1GBits. The D comes from the Roman numeral 500. The latest draft of the MIPI standard uses M-PHY technology with communication speeds of 1000M-5GBits. The M comes from the Roman numeral 1000. In addition to higher speeds, the M-PHY will also consume less and dissipate less power. Mixel and Arasan are both contributing MIPI members and have M-PHY development activity on their respective websites. More detailed information is available on the Mixel M-PHY web page.
The ultimate gadget exhibition is next week in Las Vegas. The International Consumer Electronics Show starts on January 7th and boasts 2,500 exhibitors with an estimated 20k+ new products for you to see. MIPI will be well represented with the new Netbooks and Tablet PCs. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer will keynote followed by CEOs from Ford, Intel, Qualcomm, and Nokia. The most memorable CES show for me was when Bill Gates argued that hardware will always limit computer innovation. Andy Grove followed with an argument for software being the limiting factor. As it turns out both are true.
Do you think 4G will be adopted much faster than 3G? I see a huge gap between services and device. Take horrible ATT service and iPhone as an example. But I have no doubt that the bottleneck will be filled up by 4G or 5G. We’ve also seen a trend that mobile internet is taking over desktops/laptops, not in terms of #bits transferred, but #visits. The reason twitter is so popular is because mobile internet service is so bad so website has to be simple and fast.
I think it will by necessity, smartphone adoption will be strong this year with the new Google Nexus. Just wait until Twitter gets the advertising engine ramped up. Bits transferred will skyrocket?
Thanks Dan for this posting. I would like to add that while the semiconductor industry has done a decent job at getting consensus around MIPI and MDDI, they have also done a horrible job around standards needed around SoC architecture for mobile devices such as smartphones. I take some editoral license here because I was involved in OCP. An argument can be made that the ability for companies to integrate multiple cores onto a smartphone application SoC is now gated by the infrastucture complexities of the integration itself and access to external DRAM. These could be dramatically streamlined if the industry had a unified architecture viewpoint, but today the views are fragmented. Don’t see this changing anytime soon unless the demand for new features gets way ahead of the sbility for chip suppliers to deliver, and then maybe the OEMs will step in and force a consensus. As these problems amplify with each new process generation, I expect the rate of innvoation in the mobile smartphone area to actually slow overall because of the lengthening time to market for silicon suppliers to deliver exponentially higher complexity solutions.