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It’s a Weird, Wireless World: Why Nvidia Wants Icera

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 09 May 2011 14:20:01 +0000

If you didn’t think computing’s future was both visual and mobile, then Nvidia’s decision to buy wireless radio startup Icera clinches it. The $367 million cash deal will allow Nvidia to integrate Icera’s radios with Nvidia’s Tegra processors, setting Nvidia up for a competitive battle with Qualcomm in the mobile application processor market. That Nvidia has seen a way to move from producing graphics cards to becoming a key element in a variety of high-end mobile handsets and tablets is a testament to the shift that has occurred as connectivity reshapes the computing landscape.

Icera is a nine-year-old semiconductor company that makes a baseband chip with the ability to listen to many different frequencies and technological standards in one small package. That means it can work on 2G, 3G and 4G networks that use different protocols — such as HSPA, HSPA+ and LTE — all on the same chip. The Icera chip is also programmable, making it far more flexible than one hardwired for a variety of protocols. Integrating radio technologies in future Nvidia SOC (system on a chip) hardware could lead to lower power consumption for mobile devices.

Nvidia isn’t just banking on wireless computing, it’s banking on the kind of fast device design cycles that vendors such as Apple, with its typical annual refresh, have ushered into the market. With a programmable radio, Nvidia can change-up the radio for customer’s demands at a much faster rate. Nvidia also plans to keep Icera’s other customers happy by integrating Icera’s processor with whatever other application processor of the customer’s choosing. This puts Nvidia in the baseband business and if Nvidia wants to pursue it, could result in Icera gaining some real market traction, given its relatively small balance sheet has limited the company to this point.

The deal is an echo of Intel’s decision to buy Infineon’s wireless business for $1.4 billion last year, as well as a vote for the Qualcomm way of doing things, which basically offers device makers an integrated application processor with a radio on the same chip. Other leaders in the application processor market, such as Samsung, also have their own radios, with Samsung investing in developing its own LTE chips a few years ago. Other vendors in the radio world have beefed up their application processor efforts, with firms such as Broadcom and Marvell both pushing hard on the “brains” aspect of their chip businesses. This leaves me wondering where a vendor such as Texas Instruments fits in, given that TI got out of the wireless baseband business to focus on application processors.

Regardless of where individual chip firms shake out here, the deal is a clear indication that connectivity (and cellular connectivity at that) has become a must-have feature in computing today. Nvidia’s confidence in its ability to break into this market also shows how vastly different the mobile ecosystem could be, when compared to the staid Wintel architecture that dominated the PC era.

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Poll: Friends Don't Let Friends Buy AT&T's iPhone

Om Malik — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:00:32 +0000

UPDATED: Ever since I broke up with my iPhone, not a day passes without me hearing from someone who shares the same sentiments about AT&T’s network. AT&T, of course, has done little more than hem and haw about the problem, which is much more widespread than we think.

This week at our Green:Net conference, a number of people came up to me to share their frustration with the iPhone/AT&T 3G network; most said they switch to the slower EDGE and/or Wi-Fi in order to use their iPhone. So in an attempt to gauge the extent of the problem, we have created a poll/survey. Update: To be clear, we have issued this in an effort to understand the extent/nature of the problems that folks are having with the AT&T iPhone. If you are happy with it, please fill out only the questions that reflect that and skip the ones that don’t apply to you. We will present the results in context.

Poll is now closed.

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New iPhone Will Jumpstart Demand for Wireless Broadband

Om Malik — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:27:36 +0000

It was over a decade ago when I got my first broadband connection — by today’s comparison a very slow DSL connection from my then-local provider, Verizon Communications, which went by the name of Bell Atlantic. At $60 a month (not including the cost of the modem), the service, which got around 256 Kbps on a good day (vs. top speed of up to 640 kbps), was really a novelty.

With the exception of many who worked in New York’s Silicon Alley, not many cared about the expensive, always-on connection. Being a broadband nerd of sorts, I couldn’t care less about the price tag; I couldn’t wait to pay more to get more bandwidth.

I am reminded of that moment — of that thrill — of experiencing the web without delays, thanks to the new iPhone and its ability to connect to the 3G network. I already can’t wait for AT&T to upgrade their network from HSDPA to HSPA to HSPA+ to LTE so we can get faster and faster broadband.

For now, the best we can get on the iPhone 3G is HSDPA, which has a theoretical download speed of between 400 and 700 Kbps, though Apple on it site says it’s going to be 2.4x the speed of EDGE – about 100 Kbps. Still, I am going to go out on the limb and mark July 11 down as a red-letter day for 3G wireless.

Don’t get me wrong — it isn’t the day 3G wireless was first introduced in the U.S. Neither is iPhone the first 3G phone. I have had 3G phones, USB and PC Card modems for a while now. It isn’t the first time I have used 3G broadband; I am on old hand at using EVDO to connect my laptop to the web, or at connecting my Nokia e61 to a 3G network whenever I am in Europe, or using the Nokia N95 to snap-and-share photos and videos via one of the life-streaming services.

Yet this is the first time that a 3G connection on a non-computer device actually feels like a broadband connection. “This device is a true game-changer. Why? The immediacy of the data at your fingertips is huge. Imagine, looking up anything, anywhere,” is how AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega told me in a chat earlier this year. In the U.S. especially, the iPhone is going to have a major impact, mostly because are a PC-centric society constantly search for web-like experiences. (So far, most of the carriers have made their money off 3G computer connections. I am wondering how the iPhone impacts (or not) 3G usage in Europe.)

I received the new iPhone 3G on Friday, and since then I have been tinkering around it — a lot. My first (and perhaps lasting) impression: The 3G speed is quite addictive and it doesn’t take long to slowly start switching your daily compute tasks to this device instead of reaching for your computer.

A lot of that is because the iPhone has a generous screen and is very easy to use, but more importantly it has a more than adequate browser, making it an ideal candidate for being a “cloud client.” All that was missing was a fast-enough connection that helped “off-source” some (or, in the case of others, many) tasks from their computers.

The briskness with which I can surf web pages means it has become easy to keep and eye on this and our other network blogs. The email shows up in the inbox as quickly as on my desktop. NetNewsWire’s iPhone App has already become my preferred way to read RSS. Its ability to sync with the desktop client over the web only adds to its utility. Facebook on the iPhone is almost infinitely more usable than its web counterpart. (John Markoff is marveling at the pocket-sized experience as well.)

Truphone’s new iPhone app makes it easy to place VoIP calls on the iPhone, thereby making it less necessary for me to fire up the old computer to call mom. It sure would be nice to see a Skype client for iPhone. I am sure that over a period of time other habits will form — including watching YouTube videos – which just got bearable, thanks to a faster connection.

More importantly, 3G has freed me up from thinking about the availability of a Wi-Fi connection. Of course, if everyone else gets into the same habit, as I suspect they will, this is going to put some stress on AT&T’s 3G Network.

Going back to the early days of broadband, the thrill of doing mundane web tasks faster and without tying up a phone line didn’t seem as great in the beginning, but acted as a spark for the broadband revolution. It wasn’t till Shawn Fanning unleashed Napster that broadband demand took off, eventually leading to innovations like Skype, YouTube & Facebook.

I think that from that perspective, the iPhone 3G is going to provide a similar spark for wireless broadband. Just like touch and big screens are becoming increasingly commonplace in high-end phones, over the next 12 months I wouldn’t be surprised to find mobile device makers focusing heavily on the Internet, all while waiting for the elusive killer app, which none has seen just yet. Despite the tight control of carriers on wireless spectrum, this could be the start of a new wireless wave.

http://www.youtube.com/v/FejunYTfDYg

Photo of iPhone & Safari courtesy of Apple.

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Sling-ing in the (money) rain

Om Malik — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 06:59:16 +0000

Exclusive: Connected Home has become one of the main themes of investment for venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. And the hottest deal to catch the imagination of carpet baggers is a little known company called Sling Media, a quasi-stealth mode company based in Silicon Valley. The company is about to nail some serious VC dollars – somewhere in the $10-to-$20 million range in a round which has most majors salivating. The lead investor, sources tell me, is Mobius Venture Capital, while Microsoft is said to be coming in as a strategic investor. There are a couple of others who are kicking in a few millions. So what does the company do?

The SlingBox Personal Broadcaster extends a user’s LIVE Cable TV, Satellite TV or personal video recorder (PVR) experience to any of his or her connected personal devices. SlingBox delivers a complete personal TV experience to networked PCs, WiFi-enabled laptops and PDAs, and even video-enabled mobile phones. Any device. Any network. Anywhere in the world.

In other words the shows recorded on your TiVo in Palo Alto can be watched over the Internet, say in Tokyo. The data is streamed to you over a secure tunnel, and since it does not involve any downloading (only streaming), you cannot get into legal trouble. Remember the old ruling that said it was okay to share VHS tapes with nearest and dearest. Same logic applies here as well. Gizmodo has a better description, in english.

The idea is simple: hook up the little $200 box to your TiVo or your cable box and connect it to your home internet. Then, when you’re out and about, just pull up the client software on your PDA or laptop. SlingBox’s software will detect the quality and throughput of your connection and shoot you our a recompressed, digital stream of whatever analog signal you could be watching at home. It would even work on cellphones, they say, if the bandwidth were there (and it will be Real Soon Now).

“At its heart is software that detects the size of the handheld screen and the speed of the Internet link, then compresses the broadcast into suitably sized digital chunks. It works like a long-distance remote control,” founder Blake Krikorian told Forbes. Blake, in case you don’t know him, is a dude who worked at General Magic, back in the day.

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200 Gig IPod?

Om Malik — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 20:35:04 +0000

Not anytime soon, but some day in the near future one could expect IPod with a massive 200 GB drive, and one would have to thank PMR for it.

Perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) will be the next big leap in the hard drive storage technology, and while it is too early to predict its long term business implications, the hard disk drive makers are banking on this new technology. Why? because it changes the current status quo of profitless prosperity in the HDD industry. From 1990 through 2002, HDD makers have given customers more of the same. HDD capacity increased by a compound growth rate of 93% per year, with equally spectacular price declines.

The reason it was made possible was due to industry’s move from oxide media to thin film media. Then, in the early 1990’s, in quick succession, the readback heads – which were inductors akin to miniature electrical transformers – were repand then by giant magnetoresistive (GMR) heads.

Well those technologies are coming to an end of their life-cycle, and as a result industry doyens are looking at PMR as their salvation. So what is PMR and how is it different from the current disk drive technologies. Today, the data is stored as microscopic magnets. The magnetization of the recorded bits lays parallel to the surface of the disc. This is called longitudinal recording.

In the case of PMR, as you by now might have guessed it, the magnetization of the bits is oriented perpendicularly to the surface of the disk, like corn stalks on a level field, according to Ashok Kumar, analyst with Raymond James, who goes on to say that PMR ensures longevity of the data, which cannot be compromised as easily. Kumar, in a recent research note, points out that the PMR has a higher thermal decay, and as a result, one could pack more data on to the drive using PMR. Now that is the good news.

Practical implementations of PMR have been far and few. “There are many unresolved technical and manufacturing issues in the implementation of PMR that rival in difficulty those encountered in longitudinal recording,” says Kumar. So why are we getting our knickers in a twist? Well for two reasons – PMR will make it possible to cram a lot of data in really tiny drives. Just think a 200 GB IPod!

If achievable at low cost, such a development would make disk drive storage ubiquitous in hand-held gadgets and in devices detached from a computer’s operating system, Kumar predicts and points out that it could profoundly affect the flash memory gigabyte is about $200 in 2004, says Kumar. This is the main reason you have folks like Toshiba, Hitachi and Maxtor putting a lot of their resources into PMR.

Here are some other data storage technologies currently under development.

Millipede: IBM at its Zurich, Switzerland, Research Center, is working on the development of a radically new storage concept, based on mechanical nanotechnology. Dubbed the “millipede,” the device is able to record and read patterns similar to Braille ode: raised dots and depressions, formed on a polymer layer, each dot of nanometric dimensions.

Patterned Media, where the magnetic bit allowed locations are preordained when manufacturing the disk

Self-organized magnetic array media, or SOMA, based on very regular aggregates of nanoparticles

Heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, a variant of PMR touted to enable recording densities of 1,000 Gb/in(2), or approximately 12 times higher than in any product in 2004.

(Adapted from Kumar’s HDD Business Model: from Linear Growth to Product Diversity report of June 30, 2004, Icon courtesy Elpincho/Xicons)

Realted reading: The Disk Drive Conundrum

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