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Analog & Digital Chips On The Same Silicon

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the put-'em-together dept.

jukal writes "Forbes.com writes: "Intel Corp. Monday announced plans to put some functions of analog and digital chips onto the same piece of silicon, its latest push into the communications semiconductor industry.", "which will be available early in 2004, could lead to a single-chip hand-held device that offers cellular phone, wireless-data-network and other connection services.", so, I quess this will be a competitor to the Texas Instruments' OMAP chip?"

5 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Cheaper and Better by Snoochie+Bootchie · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The point of integrating the analog and digital circuits onto one chip is not just to shrink the size of the device. It'll make a more feature-rich device cheaper, more realiable, and should result in better battery life.

    This is interesting for cell phones, but it has far more interesting possibilities in the general realm of analog and digital circuit integration.

  2. Re:Oh goodie.... by GigsVT · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Single chip calculators have been around for several year. Single chip remote controls, single chip alarm clocks, single chip video transmitters... It's all there, you just don't see it, that's sort of the point.

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  3. Single Chiped Celluar! by famazza · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This means that instead of two-chips cellular will have single-chip celluar!

    That's a huge advance!

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  4. Don't dump on Intel by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Of course they invented mixed signal, just like Microsoft invented linked lists last year.

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  5. Re:Phone size by ianaverage · · Score: 2, Insightful
    It is not about the size of your cell phone, it is about the cost. By reducing the number of chips, one can SIGNIFICANTLY reduce the cost. The phones probably are not going to get that much smaller...but it will be nice if the prices do. .09 process is going to do a lot for these chips, and we are going to see cell phone prices start to fall pretty significantly.

    On a side note...this does kinda remind me of that Futurama episode where Amy gets a call from Kip and Leela thinks that she swallowed her phone....