New Cell phone for less than 1000 Rs. or 22 US$

BANGALORE: At an event held to commemorate 20 years of Texas Instruments (TI) Bangalore facility, TI chairman Tom Engibous unveiled the company's latest offering: a cost-effective single chip solution for cell phones.

Engibous made a live phone call from Indian to Europe on a live cellular network to demonstrate the next step in TI's strategy to deliver a single-chip cell phone solution for low-cost handsets in emerging markets, such as India.

A TI release quotes GSM Association estimates - that while 80 per cent of the world's population has wireless coverage, only about 20 percent subscribe to wireless services largely due to the cost of mobile phones. This represents a huge opportunity for delivering mobile services to large sections of the world's population. In India alone, roughly 11 percent of its total population has telecom connectivity with a mobile subscriber base of 58 million (source: Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, June 05).

TI's cost-effective single-chip cell phone solution enables handset manufacturers to capitalize on the burgeoning opportunities in India and other emerging markets worldwide.

"The mobile phone is already indispensable in established markets, and wireless will become even more useful in countries where today the availability of wired communication is limited," said Engibous. "TI developed its single-chip cell phone solution specifically to narrow the 'digital divide'. Our customers can use this technology to make ultra-low-cost handsets affordable in largely untapped consumer markets such as India, China, South America, Eastern Europe and other emerging markets."

Developed at the Bangalore facility through TI's advanced 90nm CMOS manufacturing technology, the single-chip solution is now sampling and targets the mass-market voice-centric marketplace.

Leveraging TI's DRP (Digital RF Processor) technology, TI's single-chip cell phone solution integrates the bulk of handset electronics onto a single chip to reduce cost, power requirements, board area, and silicon area - performance factors that are crucial for high-volume entry-level mobile phones.

Engibous also announced the first cell phones built entirely in India, from concept to design to production. Based on TI's TCS chipset family, the GSM/GPRS handsets have been developed by Indian companies BPL and Quasar for Primus. The handsets also include TI's BRF6150 single-chip Bluetooth® module and other TI components, including audio amplifier, LED drivers, voltage regulators and standard logic/linear components. These designs will serve as platforms for development of a variety of handsets for different market segments, from ultra low-cost to mid-range voice- and feature- rich data-centric handsets. The first phones based on the TI and BPL cooperation will be available in September 2005. Primus phones will be in production later in 2005.