During the second quarter of this year it’s estimated that 19% or nearly 1 in 5 of all mobile devices shipped were smartphones. That figure is only going to go up, and the people who make the chips that power that class of device have a huge grin on their face because they know they’re going to be in the money. One such firm is Japanese semiconductor specialist Renesas, who earlier this year agreed to buy Nokia’s modem business. It was a huge announcement that the press cared little about, but it showed how Nokia was indeed serious about doing less of their own hardware in house and begin focusing on software and services. Today Renesas says that the part of their company responsible for making multimedia system on chip designs, otherwise known as a SoC, will be spun off, combined with Nokia’s former modem unit, and will be competing with firms such as ST-Ericsson and Qualcomm under the name “Renesas Mobile”.
Take a look at the majority of Android and Windows Phone 7 smartphones on the market today, and you’ll notice that they all one thing in common. The underlying system processor, graphics processor, and radios, are all manufactured by Qualcomm. They’ve succeeded at doing what no one else has done, and that’s combine everything you need to make a phone into a neat tiny little package that anyone can buy and then shove into a handset. That’s where Renesas wants to be, and that’s what they have a good shot of doing if they play their cards right.
Their goal, to achieve double the sales of their SoC business by March 2013 and to increase the ratio of products meant for markets outside Japan to 60%, will be a difficult one to achieve, but with samples of chipsets that feature both LTE and HSPA+ technology beginning to ship to customer in Q4, they’re on the road to greatness.
Qualcomm will not be sitting idle.