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MediaTek ties with Microsoft to fend off Marvell in China
Published: 9 February, 2010
Tags >> China | Marvell Technology | MediaTek | Microsoft | Reference Design | Semiconductor | Windows Mobile
All the handset platforms will be battling for the mass market smartphone this year, with Chinese 3G particularly important. MediaTek, the king of the low end Chinese cellphone market, is teaming up with Microsoft, and soon Google, to take their operating systems to low end vendors - and to try to fend off an intensifying challenge in China from Marvell.
Marvell has been stealing ground from MediaTek in China, and promises to show a platform at next week's Mobile World Congress, which will enable the $99 3G smartphone. Full details of Marvell's new applications and communications processors will be revealed later this week, and will show the company topping and tailing its mobile range. Last month it pushed the ARM architecture to its limit, showing off a quad-core implementation of its Armada processor.
Its MWC offerings will be geared to the low end, and particularly Chinese 3G, where Marvell sees its best opportunity to steal share from the established smartphone silicon giants, and even snare a deal at Nokia. The company, which acquired its mobile processor platform - and a rare full ARM developer license - with Intel's XScale business, stole a march on competitors by being first to support China Mobile's low cost 3G oPhone reference design. oPhone is not exclusive to one chip supplier, but Marvell has a headstart, and this could give it an enhanced US presence, following AT&T's recent decision to license oPhone too.
Meanwhile, MediaTek has been readying a smartphone system-on-chip that would support devices retailing under $200 unsubsidized. It hopes this will extend its reach beyond its traditional 2G and white label markets, and one of its tactics is to appeal directly to operators, which - like China Mobile - are increasingly looking to define and control the integrated hardware/software platforms for their own-branded, mass market webphones. This is an approach that Microsoft also tried in order to gain uptake for Windows Mobile in its earlier years, leading to an operator centric alliance with HTC of Taiwan.
Now MediaTek hopes to emulate its compatriot's migration from the low end white label sector to the smartphone big time, and enlist Microsoft's help too. The two companies have formed a partnership to create a reference platform for low cost OEMs and ODMs, particularly those targeting China. This will combine the MediaTek processor and baseband with Microsoft's 'Windows Phone 6' platform, which combines the OS, touch controls, and bundled capabilities such as web access, and is likely to draw on the firm's OneApp widgets platform for small footprint phones.
Reference designs that reduce cost and time to market for handset makers are common currency in the phone world, and increasingly incorporate operating systems, user interfaces and even some application layer functionality, all optimized for the silicon, to give licensees a phone 'out of the box'. These basic designs can then be customized relatively simply by the carrier, a tactic Symbian has used for years, and which Microsoft and Google are emulating as they pursue carrier driven markets for their mobile platforms.
