Going For The Wireless Gold – In Chips
While their are tons of stories about competing platforms in the wireless space, they tend to focus on device platforms or OS platforms or network platforms. Here’s a very good article looking at a battle that gets less attention: who supplies the wireless chips for mobile phones? The article mainly focuses on Intel’s battle to take market share from TI, but points out many of the hurdles faced by everyone in the market – such as whether or not users really will move on to 2.5 and 3G technologies. Of course, the article also points out that the TI/Intel (and a few others) battles are over TDMA/GPRS/GSM technologies, while Qualcomm sits pretty waiting for CDMA to take over the world. Other good points in the article include how things like Bluetooth and WiFi play into this (they don’t really…) and how the various chip makers are trying to differentiate themselves. If you’re deep into this world, there probably isn’t much new in the article – but it’s still a good overview of the market.
