From EETimes: Broadcom and Mediatek have rolled out competing integrated LTE applications processors focused on sub-$300 smartphones in their race to catch up with announced chips from market-leader Qualcomm in what are still the early days of 4G cellular.
Broadcom announced a reference design ready for production using a dual-core chip with a quad-core version coming by June. Mediatek's brawnier eight-core chip won't be in production in Asia until this fall and perhaps not until 2015 in the US.
Both companies aim to ride a smartphone market growing between 20 and 30 percent this year, where LTE is only available in 28 percent or less of the globe, Robert Rango, general manager of Broadcom’s mobile and wireless group, said at a briefing.
Broadcom introduced an LTE reference platform enabling designs that could go into production in three to four months. It's aimed at sub-$300 LTE smartphones and uses the company’s dual-core M320 LTE SoC with 150 Mbit/s Category 4 speeds. The five-mode LTE device is pin compatible with a quad-core LTE SoC set to sample in the first half of this year. The chips support WiFi, NFC, and voice over LTE (VoLTE).
“We’re the only one that will have a SoC in production in the first quarter of this year besides Qualcomm,” said Ketan Kamdar, Broadcom’s vice president of mobile platforms. “Carriers want LTE at sub-$300, sub-$200, and sub-$150 price points.”
For its part, Mediatek announced its first SoC with integrated LTE, the MT6595 octa-core SoC. The Cat 4 chip is powered by ARM Cortex-A17 and A7 CPUs in a big.LITTLE architecture and supports 4K2K video record and playback and WiFi. It targets $200 to $300 handsets.
The SoC uses a smart scheduling algorithm, which “adds another layer of power efficiency by judiciously using a processor,” said Mohit Bhushan, US marketing manager for Mediatek. Easier, smaller tasks are placed on the A7, and more intense applications, such as gaming or video streaming, are conducted on the A17, he added.
Bhushan expects the SoC to sample in Asia in late May or early June of this year with a full commercial release in the third quarter, possibly in September. Release may come later in the US due to modem certification, pushing mass production to 2015. Still, Bhushan said MediaTek isn’t worried about being a latecomer into the LTE SoC race.
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