Scalability and flexibility are key factors in the constantly evolving smart-phone segment. By gaining access to comprehensive reference designs and robust support services, mobile-handset manufacturers could gain a competitive advantage. Heeding this call, Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector has now come to market with the iSmart reference design.

Designed to jumpstart smart-phone development, the 2.5G platform-based iSmart reference design couples Motorola's i.250 Convergence GSM/GPRS platform with the iMX media-extension applications processor. With this combination, OEMs should be able to get design concepts up and running in as few as 90 days. Additionally, this platform offers the lowest part count in its class. It is designed to allow advanced voice, image, video, and data capability on a single platform with an open-standard interface. It also supports open operating systems, such as Symbian OS, Microsoft WindowsCE, eLinux, and PalmOS.

The reference design comes with fully integrated hardware, software, and support services. As a result, manufacturers are free to concentrate on differentiating their products and accelerating time to market. The manufacturers also benefit by being able to offer critical consumer applications, such as messaging, Internet browsing, digital-image capture, and audio/video encode.

Specific components of the iSmart reference design include:

• A fully integrated, high-performance CMOS image sensor. This sensor boasts features like integrated timing, control, and analog signal processing for digital-imaging applications.
• A Bluetooth V1.1-compliant wireless data transceiver. By integrating the low-power transceiver with the applications processor, it achieves a comprehensive Bluetooth solution.
• The iMX1 applications processor. Based on the ARM9 architecture, this processor provides wireless-connectivity-protocol, operating-system, application, and media-processing functionality. It features high-level on-chip integration with performance that is consistently above a low-power system. Rich peripheral support enables a full-color LCD display, smart card, USB, Bluetooth wireless technology, and expansion over high-speed multimedia-card (MMC), secure-digital (SD), and other emerging storage standards.
• The iSmart chip set and integrated GSM/GPRS software are designed to provide a total modem solution for GSM/DCS or GSM850/PCS dual-band mobile devices. The chip set also is engineered to be upgraded in order to support quad-band.

In addition to a standard reference platform, Motorola is providing a comprehensive set of tools and professional support services, which are designed to help OEMs get to market rapidly and efficiently. These tools and pieces of the solution are organized into three major development environments: the integrated development environment (IDE), radio test environment (RTE), and manufacturing test environment (MTE).

The i.Smart smart-phone reference design is now available. Products based on the design are expected to be available during the second half of 2003.

Motorola Inc.'s Semiconductor Products Sector
1299 E. Algonquin Rd., Schaumburg, IL 60196; (800) MOTOROLA, www.motorola.com/semiconductor.