Icera — the soft modem company which we’ve already covered for few times in the past — announced that it is sampling the latest in its Espresso platform series, targeted at HSPA+ smartphones. The so called Espresso 450 comprises Icera’s latest baseband and RF technology to delivers quad-band HSPA+ up to 28Mbps together with full quad-band 2G/3G voice support functions in the industry’s smallest footprint, a tiny 700mm2.
An excerpt from the press release explains the Espresso 450 better than I could ever do:
Espresso 450 uses Icera’s latest radio technology, the Livanto ICE9225 multi-mode transceiver and Livanto ICE8065 soft baseband processor. Implemented in low power 65nm CMOS technology, the ICE9225 radio delivers an unprecedented level of integration in a small 6×6 package. ICE8065 comes in a small 7×7 package and is the latest in a new generation of 40nm soft baseband chips which runs all of the modem physical layer, protocol stack, voice codecs, echo cancellation, noise reduction and equalization in software. The result is that the Espresso 450 platform delivers a high performance modem platform scaleable from 2G to 3G to 4G.
You may wonder – why do I care about this stuff? Icera says their Espresso 450 platforms permits super-fast product development cycles, which is awesome or not, depending how you look at it. On one hand, it’s good that we’ll have new phones introduced like all the time, but on the other – just when you thought you have the best product on the market, it may look like an old-school product within less than a year. Then again, that’s the world we live in…
Samples of first phones using Espresso 450 will be showing at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and first products are expected to ship in late 2011.