Chip vendor Broadcom has introduced a turnkey reference platform targeting the sub $300 LTE smartphone market. It reduces LTE modem power consumption by up to 30 percent for extended hours of use.
The chip vendor said its fifth generation turnkey platform supports Android KitKat and utilizes the company’s pin-to-pin compatible dual-core M320 or upcoming quad-core M340 LTE SoC and best-in-class connectivity and location technology.
With complete design reuse between dual-core and quad-core basebands, smartphone vendors can develop multiple devices with the same platform design while lowering engineering costs and accelerating time to market. Certification by leading carriers worldwide and Category 4 (Cat 4) speeds in FDD-LTE and TD-LTE modes enable OEMs to deliver high-performance smartphones with seamless worldwide roaming capabilities.
By offering a turnkey LTE design with 5G Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, location and near field communication (NFC) technologies, Broadcom, which competes with MediaTek, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc. is enabling consumers around the world to experience faster browsing, shorter download times and more reliable video streaming at unprecedented price points.
According to Strategy Analytics, the LTE baseband market will register about 64 percent year-on-year growth in 2014 to reach over 500 million units.
Sravan Kundojjala, senior analyst, Handset Component Technologies service at Strategy Analytics, said: “Broadcom is one of the only players with a mature carrier-ready multimode LTE SoC, the engineering expertise and the worldwide scale required to deploy complete LTE platforms.”
