Deft design

today, at the 3G World Congress & Exhibition 2005 in

, announced the availability of its latest multimedia mobile phone reference design platform.

Infineon claims its MP-EU platform enables mobile phone manufacturers to speed up introduction of next-generation UMTS phones by up to 30 percent from today’s average of 14 months.

The MP-EU is said to be the industry’s most integrated platform supporting UMTS, EDGE and GSM/GPRS cellular standards. Its intelligent scalability concept allows mobile phone manufacturers to evolve from 2G/2.5G phones to 2.75G and 3G phones as well as to easily adapt to design trends, since basic hardware and software components within the platform remain unchanged.

Using Infineon’s scalable platform MP-EU enables mobile phone manufacturers to quickly introduce a variety of UMTS models all based on the same core architecture, such as voice and data centric UMTS phones for business users and entertainment-centric UMTS phones for juvenile users.

Furthermore, mobile phone manufacturers using Infineon’s GSM/GPRS platform benefit from easy migration to EDGE/UMTS dual mode phones and improved time to market by reuse of applications.

Subject to complexity as well as additional functionalities to be implemented, the development cycle is likely to be reduced by up to 30 percent. UMTS phones incorporating Infineon’s MP-EU platform provide extensive mobile phone multimedia functionality, such as video streaming and video telephony compliant with the requirements in Europe, Asia, Japan and North America.

Infineon further claims that the MP-EU platform offers the industry’s highest-integration. At present, an UMTS phone needs around 300 to 450 electronic components. With Infineon’s UMTS platform the number is reduced to below 200. MP-EU includes Infineon’s S-GOLD2 baseband processor which removes the necessity for an additional companion chip to deal with the processing needs such as modem- video and audio-data-processing on-chip The MP-EU platform supports all frequency bands for GSM/GPRS/EDGE and all six frequency bands specified for UMTS.

Market research company Strategy Analytics expects the number of UMTS mobile phones sold to grow from about 45 million in the year 2005 to approximately 412 million in 2010, amounting for an annual growth rate of about 55 percent over the next five years.