Motorola Announcing Smartphone Reference Design

With the 3GSM World Congress kicking off next week, the major chip makers are scurrying to make announcements about upcoming wireless products. Last week Texas Instruments announced it was updating its OMAP line, yesterday Intel announced that it was working on wireless chips based on its XScale processors, and today Motorola launched the i.Smart smartphone reference design.

This has been created to help companies who want to design 2.5G smartphones and wireless handhelds around Motorola chips get their products up and running in just a few months.

The design is based around Motorola's i.MX family of processors, which is the new name for the Dragonball MX1 and MXL chips. These are ARM-based processors. Products based on the i.Smart design can run the Palm OS, Symbian OS, or Microsoft Windows CE.

The i.Smart reference design provides a total modem solution for GSM/DCS (digital cellular system) or GSM850/PCS (personal communications services) dual-band mobile devices and is also engineered to upgrade to support quad-band.

It supports a full-color LCD display, Smartcard, USB, Bluetooth wireless technology and expansion over high-speed MultiMedia cards (MMC), Secure Digital (SD), and other Storage standards.

The full reference design will be released next week. All the hardware and software is expected to be available during the second half of this year.

Thanks to willem huizinga for the tip.

Related Links

• Your Guide to Wireless
• Intel Announces Smartphone Chips
• TI Introduces New Processors for Handhelds