|
MARKET
TRENDS FOR PORTABLE TELECOMMUNICATION
Mobile
Phone Market Reaches 1 Billion Units Handset By 2003
Hong
Kong, 15 Dec, 1999 - As the telecommunication
technology advanced, mobile phone is migrated from a voice
only machine to nowadays an information tool. "The
limitation was on the bandwidth," said Mr. Humphrey
Leung, President of Solomon Systech Limited. "We had
analog mobile phones which used AMPS technology, mainly for
voice transmission only. The market has then moved to
digital phones with GSM, CDMA and PHS technology where more
data information and graphic is possible to be transmitted.
Looking ahead to the future generation of 2G, 2G+ or even
3G
bandwidth, it will come to the age of image or multimedia
smart phones."
With
more functions, mobile phone is not just a phone. It
is also
a pager, a PDA, a web browser and etc. The market
demand is huge for an universal device combining all
functions in one. "There was an estimation that there
were 420 million mobile phone users around the world this
year, an increase from 306 million at the end of last
year," said Mr. Leung. "And many people have been
forecasting the number of mobile phone handsets sales will
reach one billion units in 2003."
Moving
along with this trend, advancement in display technology
and
its related driving and controlling IC becomes critical. "Taking consideration of image or video display in
multimedia applications, it requires a lot of graphic
manipulation, compression and decompression," said Mr.
Leung. "While the baseband processor is heavily loaded
in handling all the video and data transmission, all the
display and human interface activities are to be separated.
And that comes to the need of an unique, standalone graphic
co-processor." This kind of graphic co-processor will
include functions like graphic acceleration engine,
character compression/decompression, handwriting
recognition, internet formatter with embedded RISC
processor.
"Solomon
Systech has a whole series of LCD Driver IC available for
current mobile phone design," said Mr. Leung.
"Meanwhile, we are developing both new display driver
ICs and interface processors to provide our customers total
display system solutions, as aligning with our commitment
to
focus in developing innovative system technology for next
generation display."
¡@
|
