Texas Instruments offering new phone chip for Asia

Reuters reports that Texas Instruments will "introduce a high-speed wireless chip for use by a wider set of mobile handset makers, especially in advanced Asian markets." The W-CDMA based chip was developed in collaboration with NTT DoCoMo.

Yankee Group analyst John Jackson said, "This will allow the manufacturers to get 3G phones to market with the same bang but less buck." According to analysts, TI's new OMAPV2230 chip "represents a move beyond the custom W-CDMA chips TI makes for its major customers" including Ericsson and Nokia.

Will Strauss at Forward Concepts said, "Without the standard chips they wouldn't be able to expand their market outside of their two biggest W-CDMA customers." Strauss predicted "about 46 million W-CDMA phones are expected to be sold in 2005 with sales expected to grow to 90 million phones in 2007 and about 255 million in 2010."