Cost-cutting has become the central focus for many within the cellular industry, but none more so than those involved with developing and manufacturing handsets. Not unaffected by these current day issues, Nokia has announced that it is investing in a modular approach to building new handsets that it maintains could cut the cost of developing cell phones by up to 99 per cent.
The company, which claims it can cost up to US$220 million to develop a new handset, has joined with NXP Semiconductors to bring to fruition this new modular approach - labelled network on terminal architecture (NoTA), that is designed to shift the handset creation process from a tightly coupled architecture to one that uses a distributed or modular system.
The change would see the handset no longer being centred around a single all-powerful engine but instead using a network of subsystems performing specific tasks such as multimedia and connectivity. The two firms believe that NoTA is highly scalable and enables the easier integration of new features and could lead to much faster times to market. However, no timescales have been announced for when NoTA-based handsets might appear.
For more:
- go to Information Week
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