Samsung Rolls Out Mobile Chips

Samsung is paving the way for the next generation of mobile devices, and the company introduced various mobile chips aimed at improving the performance of sophisticated devices without raising power consumption.

The second-largest handset maker in the world rolled out two 1-GHz ARM Cortex A8-based application processors, and Samsung said these chips are capable of 3-D graphics rendering, high-resolution video support, and real-time Internet access, and both have low power architectures. The S5PC110 is targeted at smaller devices like smartphones, and the S5PV210 is aimed at portable computing devices like netbooks or tablets, Samsung said. These processors could eventually find their way into a wide variety of devices, as Samsung chips are found in multiple consumer electronic devices including Apple's iPhone.

"PC-level performance with lower power consumption will become mainstream requirements for mobile devices," said Dr. Kwang Hyun Kim, senior VP at Samsung, in a statement. "Samsung developed S5PC110 and S5PV210 application processors to satisfy these conflicting requirements to enable a new level of user experience not previously possible."

The company also introduced a chip that integrates capacitive touch-screen control in a display driver. Samsung said the Touch Embedded DDI chip will allow for slimmer form factors, and it is targeted at smartphones, MP3 players, and portable media players. Capacitive screens are found in handsets like the iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre, and myTouch 3G, and they enable things like multi-touch and soft-touch input. Industry watchers believe the market for capacitive screens will grow substantially over the next few years, but resistive screens will still garner a strong market share due to backwards-compatibility issues, as well as support for handwriting recognition.

Samsung also rolled out a system-on-a-chip image sensor that brings support for 5-megapixel cameras on mobile phones. The S5K4EA chip combines a CMOS image sensor with an image signal processor, which could lead to slimmer camera phones, Samsung said.

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