Given the significant market size for the cell phone industry and the different types of products available, it's not surprising that Qualcomm and Texas Instruments offer a number of different baseband solutions. Their semiconductor devices have been advancing to accommodate the wide variety of systems, taking into account different size, power consumption and functionality restrictions.

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Qualcomm's road map has four platforms of baseband devices, including value, multimedia, enhanced multimedia and convergence. Each accommodates different levels of cell phone offerings and the different networks on which they operate. Recent Qualcomm devices analyzed by Semiconductor Insights (SI), such as the MSM6260, fall within the multimedia platform family. These devices are interesting due to the process technology migration and lithography shrink that have been implemented to increase functionality without drastically increasing the die size or power consumption.

Things have been quite interesting for Qualcomm recently. The Nokia-Qualcomm licensing agreement expired on April 9, and there is no new agreement. This has some serious implications for Nokia, as it could prevent it from selling its third-generation (3G) handsets that use Qualcomm parts, of which there are many. Nokia offered Qualcomm $20 million to be allowed to continue using the patents, claiming that the sum was a "fair and reasonable" amount. Qualcomm disagreed, and subsequently filed a demand for arbitration by the American Arbitration Association. It will be of great interest to see how this issue is resolved. Considering their strong positions, both Qualcomm and Nokia have much to gain, as well as lose, from working together.

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