Nokia Sells LTE Modem Unit

Nokia said today that it will sell its wireless modem business to Japan’s Renesas Technology Corp. for about $200 million in a bid to focus on its core mobile device and Internet services activities. In addition to the financial transaction, Nokia and Renesas also agreed to cooperate on the development of future radio technologies. The two companies have been working together to develop an HSPA+/LTE platform. “I believe that the integration of the world class Nokia wireless modem into Renesas Electronics’ strong multimedia processing and RF capabilities, places Renesaas Electronics in a strong position in HSPA+/LTE chipsets,” said Kai Oistamo, Executive Vice President, Nokia
Nokia’s new head of mobile solutions, Anssi Vanjoki, recently admitted, the vendor has bigger challenges, like regaining a leadership position in the smartphone market, to overcome right now, reports Light Reading.
Other companies that make LTE modem chips include Beceem with their BCS500 multi-mode chip. It supports both 802.16e and 802.16m, as well as the 3GPP-LTE standard, based on Release 8 specifications. Meanwhile, Sequans’ LTE development program was launched in 2009 and is backed by Motorola and Alcatel-Lucent, two of the world’s leading system vendors.
Unlike other mobile device manufacturers, Nokia is not adopting the Android platform. Instead it is going with MeeGo, a Linux-based open source mobile operating system project that merges Intel’s Moblin (running on Atom chips) and Nokia’s Maemo (running on ARM chips).

Nokia is making a break from ARM chips. The impact of MeeGo remains to be seen, but with 10 Mbps mobile speeds soon to be available, new mobile applications will need faster hardware. Connected TVs are just the beginning. Imagine virtual world headsets, tightly coupled to GPUs.

Unlike proprietary virtual world platforms, such as Second Life, ScienceSim leverages open source building blocks based on OpenSimulator (OpenSim) software. Gartner estimates cloud services is currently a $46 billion market and will be worth $150 billion by 2013. Faster CPUs are a given for 10 Mbps mobile connections.

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