Trio collaborate on reference phones

LONDON — Communications Consultants Worldwide (CCww) and its joint venture operation in Taiwan, CCasia, is working with Silicon Laboratories to create innovative handset reference designs.

CCww (Bournemouth, U.K.) is a developer of wireless protocol stack solutions while CCasia, a joint venture between CCww and Winity Technology set up in November, provides wireless system design and integration. Togther with Silicon Laboratories they have completed the integration of a GSM/GPRS reference design for licensing to handset manufacturers.

The reference design is configurable for use in a range of handsets from entry-level GSM phones to high-end feature and smart phones. At the core of the design is Silicon Laboratories' AeroFONE™ single-chip phone, combining the conventionally separate digital and analog base-band and RF transceiver into a single-chip design. CCww's resource-efficient GSM/GPRS stack has been ported and validated by the partners to create a complete and configurable reference design.

One configuration of this design provides a low-end GSM phone that provides rapid time-to-market coupled with competitive low cost in manufacture. At the other end of the scale, CCasia can provide a complete feature-phone design to include: graphical MMI, memory file-system, 2 M-pixel camera, MP3 player, VoIP, Bluetooth, GPS, IM and more to create a high-specification feature phone.

CCasia has experience in field trials using more than 50 networks world-wide as well as optimization of handset production.