In one of the episodes of Frasier, Frasier Crane tries to impress members of the Seattle Opera board by inviting them to an elaborate reception in his apartment. Niles, Frasier's younger brother, worries that Frasier has gone too far by arranging for three chefs and three different chamber orchestras to entertain the guests. "Are you familiar with the concept 'Less is More'?," Niles gently inquires. "If 'less' is 'more'," Frasier impatiently interrupts him, "just imagine how much more 'more' would be."
This must also be Texas Instruments' approach. The company has just introduced what surely must be the industry's first solution which integrates mobile WLAN (mWLAN), Bluetooth and FM stereo audio--all in a rather cramped platform for mobile phones. With the new pWiLink 5.0, TI is offering seamless cellular and WiFi connectivity to consumers with VoWLAN functionality, optimized on TI's OMAP-Vox and WiLink solutions, enabling UMA on the handset across multiple operating systems such as Symbian, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Linux and low-level operating systems. UMA provides consumers voice access over WLAN or the cellular network using their mobile phones, and it will transition to IMS as the fixed mobile convergence market matures.
The WiLink 5.0 platform integrates TI's BlueLink 6.0 solution, which combines the Bluetooth with HiFi FM stereo and mono audio on a single chip. The combination of mWLAN, Bluetooth and FM functionality allows users, for example, to listen to the radio on a Bluetooth headset while checking email via WiFi. The company says that by using its DRP technology at the 90 nanometer node, the WiLink 5.0 device cuts both solution size and power consumption by up to 20 percent over competitive solutions in critical modes of operation. Wide sample availability of WiLink 5.0 solutions are expected to be available in late 2006. Handsets using the WiLink 5.0 platform are expected to be on the market in early 2007.
For more on TI's WiLink 5.0:
- see this Digit-Life report