Reuters
Intel and Motorola join Nokia-backed chip alliance
Wednesday February 4, 12:21 pm ET
By Eric Auchard
NEW YORK, Feb 4 (Reuters) - Intel and Motorola are among 35 companies
that have agreed to join an industry alliance created by top mobile
phone maker Nokia and three key chip suppliers to help the industry
simplify how new phones are designed.
Intel Corp. (NasdaqNM:INTC - News), the world's largest semiconductor
maker, and Motorola Inc. (NYSE:MOT - News), the No. 2 supplier of
mobile phones, are joining the Mobile Industry Processor Interface
(MIPI) Alliance founded by Nokia (NOK1V.HE), Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN
- News), STMicroelectronics (Paris:STM.PA - News) and ARM (London:ARM.L
- News) in July.
The four founding members of MIPI said they had formed the alliance
to spur development of a wider range of wireless features and to
guard against any one industry player dominating the new generation
of phones.
Wireless equipment makers are hoping to quicken demand for a new
generation of mobile phones that offer Internet and computer features
and not just voice calling.
The 39 members of the alliance include five of the top six mobile
phone handset makers and four of the top five companies in the wireless
semiconductor industry.
Other members include Philips Electronics of the Netherlands, Renesas
Technologies of Japan, Samsung Electronics of Korea, Siemens of
Germany, Toshiba of Japan. Vimicro, a maker
of chips for the Chinese market used to control images and other
multimedia functions on phones, also joined.
Other companies include phone, hardware and software vendors that
are looking to help define the technology building-blocks that will
help create new phone features.
Common rules are needed because the wide variety of phones, networks
and software can fail to work together properly when using advanced
services such as picture messaging, e-mail, calendars, games and
video camera phones.
In contrast to the computer industry -- where hundreds of thousands
of product developers are able to build products to run on a single
basic standard dominated by Microsoft in software and Intel in hardware
-- the mobile phone industry has hundreds of suppliers but few common
product standards.
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