Stefan Mileschin

Marvell co-founder Weili Dai said that mobile processors will have to ship with modems in the future.

She said that building a single unified platform will become important for the 'always on, always connected' lifestyle.

Dai told EE Times that pretty soon all tablets will need to have CPU/modem hybrids.

Marvell has announced its new PXA988 and PXA986 products. These are unified to the nines with wi-fi to Bluetooth to FM radio, Near Field Communications and GPS.

The company even managed to bundle up RF transceivers and integrated PMIC for both time division synchronous code division multiple access and wideband code division multiple access protocols.

What this means is that the phone can run both on Chinese networks as well as elsewhere in the world.

This will mean that phones which flood the Chinese market can now be sold elsewhere.

The rest of the chip is fairly bog standard. It is a dual-core, 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor tweaked so that it can handle multimedia demands like 3D and 1080p video.

Dai said that because it was cheap the adding of radio fuctions would allow more consumers to take advantage radio functions in their devices, without having to sacrifice performance.

She said that integration will take place because they will drive down the cost of phones. Having extra radios on a chip doesn't do any harm.

Marvell's PXA920 processor is going to be put under the bonnet of of the next three Samsung Galaxy phone models aimed at the Chinese market.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/mobile...-the-new-black