Marvell adds to its Armada fleet

CHIP MAKER Marvell is set to launch several new chips aimed at tackling both the high and low ends of the mobile market.

At the low end the company has developed two new chipsets, the Pantheon 910 and 920. Due to be released next week, these are designed be fully featured but cheap enough to allow manufacturers to break the magic $100 mark for a smartphone.

Despite the low cost, the Pantheon chipset is a full cellular system and incorporates Marvell's advanced modem technology and multimedia processing that promises to mix HD quality video with decent battery life.

According to Marvell, these platforms will help enable the next billion users, by making fully featured smartphones available to a much larger audience, particularly in emerging markets.

"Higher performance and greater integration of onboard functionality lowers the manufacturing costs and makes the vision of a mass market $99 smartphone very real," said Weili Dai, co-founder of Marvell and vice president and general manager of its semiconductor consumer and computing business unit.

"A $99 smartphone not only will accelerate upgrading of the world's existing feature phones to smartphones, it will put instant access, rich media and a wealth of applications within reach of millions more first-time consumers around the globe."

At the opposite end is the latest addition to the Armada family, the 618, which is based on the ARM v7 and is designed to power next generation HD-capable smartphones. Going head to head with the likes of Qualcomm's Sanpdragon, the Armada 618 is a 1GHz CPU which integrates full-HD encode and decode and has full Flash support and can handle 3D graphics through DirectX, Open GL ES 2.0 and Open VG 1.1.

Able to run Linux, Android and Windows Mobile, the 12mm12mm chip can use LP-DDR1 or LP-DDR2 memory up to 533MHz, a highly flexible display controller capable of four simultaneous displays at up to 2Kx2K resolution, and a highly robust security subsystem that includes a secure execution processor

"Importantly, the Armada 600 series of application processors gives our customers a common platform solution to build multiple products and formats for the always-on consumer - scaling from smartphones to e-readers to tablets without compromising either the multimedia performance or the battery life," added Dai.

The Pantheon chipset platforms and the Armada 618 are currently sampling to selected customers, and all of them will be on display at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. µ