I have little doubt the company will look to build optimized chips for multiple device segments, but lets be honest: The hottest market is one for the smartphones. Only a seventh of the world’s population owns a smartphone these days and the pace of adoption is picking up; not getting into this market soon could miss a ride up the sales growth curve. And this isn’t the first time Broadcom has been an ARM licensee: In 2011 the company noted it had a long-term chip strategy that included application processors.

Broadcom is currently known more for its wireless chip technologies, not for systems-on-a-chip that also include CPUs and graphics capabilities like the ones made by the companies listed above. But there are plenty of reasons for companies to build an entire chip solution for mobile devices. By designing chips that are optimized for certain features, such as energy-efficient wireless technologies or high-powered graphics rendering, chip-makers can differentiate their silicon and charge more for their products.

A perfect example of this is Nvidia, which has a rich background in graphics. By licensing the ARM architecture, the company was able to make a complete system-on-a-chip for smartphones and tablets that uses a dozen graphics cores for fluid interfaces and gaming.

The company’s next chip, the Tegra 4, will include 72 graphics cores. One thing previously missing from Nvidia’s bag of tricks, however, was wireless communication; a weakness that was strengthened when the company bought Icera in 2011.

Broadcom’s approach is the complete opposite, but could turn out similarly. The company has a rich background in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other radio technologies, and those wireless chips are often used by other chip-makers to augment standalone application processors. Now, with the new ARM license, the company has a processor strategy that it can integrate with its wireless smarts.

That’s good for two reasons. First, full system-on-a-chip solutions can generate far more money than a wireless-only chip. Second, more companies with applications processors are integrating their own wireless solutions. That would mean over time, fewer device makers will need Broadcom’s more generic wireless chips.

Simply put, Broadcom needs to expand its offerings to include more system-on-chip products if it wants to compete, grow and evolve in the future. Sure, of the company’s plans could apply to set-top boxes, smart appliances or other market segments. But in order to keep a foothold in the mobile device market, Broadcom’s move ensures it stays relevant in one of the biggest and fastest growing segments: Smartphones.

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New tech to cram more bits in your hertz.

These researchers have managed to achieve this epic speed at a distance of less than one meter using what researchers call “twisted signals.” According to Extreme Tech, which explains it so well:

These twisted signals use orbital angular momentum (OAM) to cram much more data into a single stream. In current state-of-the-art transmission protocols (WiFi, LTE, COFDM), we only modulate the spin angular momentum (SAM) of radio waves, not the OAM. If you picture the Earth, SAM is our planet spinning on its axis, while OAM is our movement around the Sun. Basically, the breakthrough here is that researchers have created a wireless network protocol that uses both OAM and SAM.

The resulting technology offers the spectral efficiency of 95.7 bits per hertz. To put that into perspective, today on Verizon’s LTE network, the equipment delivers 1.5 bits per hertz of spectrum. By delivering so much data per hertz of spectrum, the barriers toward building ever-faster networks as defined by Shannon’s Law would become fundamentally reset, allowing the next generation of engineers to build networks unimaginable to today’s generation.

Obviously, the usual caveats around new technologies apply. So far this is in the lab only. The speeds aren’t maintained for long distances and are based on lightwaves as opposed to radio waves (this means line of sight is essential). There’s no indication of how much power chips to deliver this type of speed would consume, and there’s no actual ecosystem in place to support or even twist those wavelengths.

That being said, there’s no Moore’s Law governing wireless networks, which is a real problem given how much data we are demanding via mobile networks. Granted, Wi-Fi and more efficient technologies will help, but we need a fundamental breakthrough on the physics side to keep up with wireless consumption. Terahertz spectrum and chips are one way, and these twisted signals might be another. As a plus, they could work on fiber optic networks too, which means we might see another boost in broadband capacity along our long haul and core networks.

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The San Diego-based wireless silicon vendor on Monday said it has acquired Summit Microelectronics for an undisclosed amount. Summit makes programmable chipsets designed to optimize power performance in portable electronics and networking infrastructure.

Based out of Sunnyvale, Calif., the company was formed in 1997 and was backed by August Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, HLM Management, Norwest Venture Partners, Pequot Capital and Spinnaker Ventures. Summit has 50 employees, all of whom are joining Qualcomm’s ranks in its CDMA Technologies division, which is responsible for making the company’s core radio modems and Snapdragon application processors.

Battery technologies simply haven’t kept up with the power demands of smartphones, which has led manufacturers like Motorola and Nokia to stick larger and larger lithium-ion packs in their handsets to keep them running. Qualcomm didn’t explain exactly how it will integrate Summit’s technology into its chipsets, saying only the acquisition “enhances the competitiveness of Qualcomm’s chipset solutions and enables us to provide our customers with industry leading power management and charging performance.”

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Called the ASR5500, the core gateway is designed to handle what Cisco called the “new normal” of the mobile data network: millions of devices, each with dozens of applications in constant communication with the network. According to Murali Nemani, Cisco director of service provider mobility, that influx presents three distinct challenges: maintaining millions of sessions, supporting millions of individual transactions and handling enormous throughput.

You can distinguish between the three by breaking down a Google Chat conversation, Nemani said. Chat is constantly creating sessions over the network, pinging Google’s servers to see if an IM session is being initiated. If a chat session is opened, the messages sent between the participants are the transactions, while the actual payload of those messages – the text, video or voice – is handled by raw network throughput.

All of the background sessions and transaction signaling that makes our mobile apps tick run over the what’s known as the control plane, while what we actually experience – the services and content – ride the bearer plane. The capacity of both planes needs to be scaled enormously to meet the smartphone’s unquenchable hunger, but the problem facing carriers is that the capacity demands of those planes varies dramatically from site to site and time of day.

“In the morning there is a massive spike in signaling as people check e-mail and do social networking,” Nemani said. All of that signaling traffic places enormous demands on the control plane, but requires very little in terms of throughput, he said. “In the evening it’s throughput that’s in most demand as consumers shift to watching video and viewing other content,” Nemani said.

When designing the ASR5500 Cisco attempted to create an “elastic” core, which would prevent operators from having to scale both their signaling and throughput requirements for the worst-case scenarios of any given day, Nemani said. Rather than create dedicated resources for each type of traffic, the gateway’s processers are generic, allowing capacity to be shifted between the control and bearer planes in real-time. The result, Nemani said, is a dynamic mobile core that at any given moment can be signaling juggernaut or a packet-routing powerhouse.

Two carriers, Verizon Wireless and India’s Bharti, have already installed the new gateway in their networks, but given Cisco’s track record in the mobile core, many more operators are sure to follow.

While we often hear of the big radio network deals going to Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks, Cisco has been the unsung vendor in the guts of the network ever since its scooped up gateway specialist Starent in 2009. The core is a much smaller contract than the radio win in terms of revenues and it’s often less publicized. Synergy Research estimates that the mobile core market totaled $2.4 billion globally in 2011. It’s growing rapidly, but to put that in perspective a single large LTE radio network build can easily cost more than $2 billon.

Cisco, however, is by far the market leader when it comes to the mobile core. According to the vendor, it has won 270 3G total gateway contracts and is the core supplier for more than 30 LTE networks.

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