Chip giants look to netbooks to ride out storm
Published: 5 January, 2009
READ MORE: Semiconductor | Netbook
New handsets may include ever wider silicon-based functionality, but tighter integration into single-chip designs, and consolidation among the baseband majors, are putting huge pressure on semiconductor companies. Those that look unlikely to grab a mainstream position in smartphones are increasingly looking to the emerging breed of netbooks - low cost, lightly featured, web-optimized laptops - to keep them alive in the mobile market through the downturn.
Intel leads this trend, with its powerful position in the PC industry making it likely that its Atom family of netbook and mobile processors will be dominant in this sector, even if it finds it harder to break into the conventional smartphone world. Intel will also be buoyed by its usual strategy of investing through recession - which executives insisted last week would be the pattern for 2009 - in order to emerge from the downturn with the most advanced products in key growth areas. With operators relying on mobile data for their own survival plans, netbooks with embedded 3G, Wi-Fi and/or WiMAX should certainly represent one of those growth areas, and Atom is already driving volumes at Intel, even if it is squeezing margins.
Other chip companies are also looking to the netbook, and most of these - including Qualcomm - are supporting designs based on the ARM processor, the main alternative to Intel's x86. Freescale is prominent among these. The former Motorola chip unit announced last year that it would move out of cellphone basebands and focus its wireless efforts on low power technologies for emerging categories. The company has followed through with a new ARM/Linux-based processor, the i.MX51 system-on-chip, which costs under $20 including a separate power management chip and Linux software stack. This would enable a netbook priced at under $200 retail, said Freescale, contrasting this with a $60 for an Intel Atom processor with separate chipset, power management IC and Windows XP. This has kept netbook prices around $350 or more, says Freescale.
The i.MX51 is the vendor's first chip to use the new ARM Cortex A8 core and comes with various integrated peripherals such as graphics and imaging accelerators.
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