18. March 2011 by cameron.

Finally I found a headline that is inspiring enough to blog on!

When I first started this company and tried to raise funds, I frequently heard the response, “why would I want to do anything with my phone but make a phone call?” Needless to say, those Venture Capitalists did not fund me.

The analysts eventually see the obvious. I got the following link in my email today from CTIA SmartBrief:

Memory — the forgotten but critical phone component

The link actually points to the market for mobile DRAM, but DRAM is only one component of the memory system for (smart) phone memory. In the interest of making a short headline, they reduced the wording. The analogies are clear. Smartphones are rapidly following the same growth path that drove the PC market:

The hardware hits a minimum performance level. We owe our appreciation to Intel for the PC processor and many thanks to ARM for the phone CPU. Finally the phone is smart.

Connectivity reaches a minimum level of usability. This happened with the internet and the dial up modem and eventually DSL for the PC. With the smartphone, it required 3G networks.

Next the interface becomes user friendly. Think Microsoft with Windows then Apple with the iPhone OS (a.k.a. iOS).

Next applications explode. This does not happen until the environment is ripe. It requires millions of people to start writing software. This happens when it is easy (thanks to Sun for JAVA) and profitable. Writing applications for the PC was not easy, so it took years to develop, but thanks to Windows platform and x86 backward compatibility, the application base eventually got huge. As a result of controlling the OS, Microsoft dominated. The next time around it happened much faster. First Apple’s app store followed by Rim (Blackberry apps) and then Google with the Android open platform enables this on the phone. These models work because it strikes right at the opportunistic strength. Almost anyone with a good idea can write app. If they write a good app, it is very profitable. See this link from 2008 iPhone Developers Go From Rags to Riches. In one month, January 2011 over $200million was raised in venture capital for this market. Once again the VCs catch on after the market explodes.

So this is the meat of the post. Finally we have the infrastructure and people start to really care about the phone response. The smartphone has finally reached the point where the applications will start to get hungry. More power applications require a powerful  memory subsystem. This is driving the market. The first obvious signs in the mobile DRAM and NAND flash markets. The other market for memory is hidden. The CPU requires multiple levels of memory. Small storage is required for processing in an application. Next are the levels of Cache. To meet the form factor required for a handheld device, a significant amount of memory including the first and second level cache must be implemented as embedded SRAM on the chip with the CPU. This drives a market for embedded SRAM. The ever increasing compute requirements of smartphones as well as a host of other mobile devices ( iPads, XOOM, netbooks, and more) will continue to drive the market for embedded memory.  The embedded memory market has seen recent consolidation with the acquisition of Virage Logic by Synopsys. Mobile Semiconductor is expanding their presence in the mobile embedded SRAM market by introducing silicon proven high speed SRAM compilers that target the low power process technologies such as SMIC 65nm LL process and the TSMC 40nm LP process.

The system performance is driven not only by the components, but the control of these components. The value of the SSD controller market is an important part of the performance of storage systems. Mobile Semiconductor is exploiting the opportunity in the SSD controller market.

Keep tuned and check in at www.mobile-semi.com for future posts!

Cameron

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28. March 2009 by cameron.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the capabilities of the smartphone and smaller PCs such as netbooks are converging. As the PC suppliers look for paths to increase revenue in a down economy, it is no surprise that they are looking towards the rapidly growing smartphone market. Recently Dell announced that they would enter the smart phone market. As reported by the WSJ: Dell Prepares To Dial Into Smartphone Marketplace As more laptop vendors try to enter the market, expect to see consolidation between the two groups. The PC vendors will put pressure on the smartphone vendors such as HTC, but at the same time, they need the network capabilities and low power tricks that the smartphone vendors have developed. Any alignment of a major communication chipset companies such as QualComm aligning with the laptop company such as Dell could foretell of a powerful merger.

Verizon today gave added credibility to the trend when they announced that they would sell netbooks. Washington Post: Verizon plans to sell netbooks: report.

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6. January 2009 by admin.

Watching progress over the last year on mobile devices, the importance of providing a truly open source platform has become increasingly clear. Opening up the development of a platform unleashes is an incredible amount of development resources that can go into making devices more powerful, and it comes at a very low cost.

The strength of a world wide group of developers joining forces on a common project is old news to the open source community with substantial success of the Linux operating system holding substantial market share against commercial operating systems. Beyond operating systems, many open source applications have been developed around the GNU public license. For example, sites such as http://sourceforge.net/ contain thousands of applications available for free download.

What is different about recent activity is the speed at which the open source movement is impacting the the mobile device market. Proprietary operating systems have long held control of mobile devices because of the lack of common architecture for these devices. The operating system for Palm devices for example could not be used on Nokia, RIM, or Motorola phones, and consequently applications were for the most part available only on a single platform.

There was some progress on porting Linux to various phone platforms prior to 2008, but wide spread open source development kicked into high gear when Google opened up development of the Android platform. It was less than a year from the November 2007 press release for Android, Industry Leaders Announce Open Platform for Mobile Devices, until sales of the G1 phone were announced by a carrier: The first Android-Powered phone. Over the intervening year, I tracked the volume of postings on the android development site. At the group site, over 1800 postings are recorded from over 3000 members. I saw a flurry of activity last spring, with 10-20 postings every day which foretold the success of Android. During 2008, many more jumped on the open source platform. Here are a few of the notable announcements.

June 10, iPhone Applications (as close as Apple can get so far!)
June 24, 2008: Nokia takes Symbian Open Source
July 28th, TI and Digikey announce Beagle Board
January 2009 Consumer Electronics Show: Palm needs Nova to shine
We are still waiting to hear from RIM: RIM says open source Blackberry unlikely

Expect to hear a slew of new announcements and continuing inroads for open source operating systems and application s for mobile devices in 2009!

Cameron Fisher, CEO Mobile Semiconductor

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26. October 2008 by admin.

Blog Site Created

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