Chip supplier Marvell is hooking up with e-reader companies, hoping to take the lead in silicon design for this nascent market.
Entourage Edge has both a 9.7-inch e-reader display and a 10.1-inch color LCD and runs Google's Android OS on top of Marvell silicon.
(Credit: Entourage)The market for e-readers, currently led by the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader, is poised for growth, according to Weili Dai, a Marvell co-founder and general manager of the consumer and computing business unit. "The timing is right for the e-reader market to take off in volume," Dai said in an interview.
Marvell, though not a household name like Intel, is a major supplier of communications, storage, and wireless chips. Marvell, for example, supplied the Wi-Fi chip in the original iPhone and is a leading supplier of controller chips for solid-state drives.
In the e-reader market, Marvell is hoping to play a leading role in making e-readers a low-cost, mass-market device. "We're targeting a retail price of $150," Dai said. Partners include E Ink, a supplier of electronic paper displays; FirstPaper, an e-reading and advertising start-up; and Plastic Logic, an e-reader maker. Both E Ink and FirstPaper are backed by media company Hearst.
E-reader from Spring Design runs Android and integrates two displays.
(Credit: Spring Design)The Marvell Armada 166E system-on-a-chip, which will power a number of upcoming e-readers, integrates key features onto a single piece of silicon, such as the main processor--called an application processor--and the display controller. Armada is based on intellectual property from U.K.-based ARM, whose designs power most of the world's cell phones. Marvell ships 1 billion chips per year, two-thirds of which include Marvell processors running the ARM instruction set.
Marvell processors running at 1GHz will be used in many of the initial e-readers, though Marvell has designs that scale up in performance to 2GHz, according to Dai.
One of the first products to use the Marvell chip is the Entourage Edge, which claims to be the first "dualbook"--combining an E Ink EPD (electronic paper display) with an LCD and Netbook, notepad, and audio/video player functions.
Marvell will also power the dual-screen Alex e-reader from Spring Design. Like the Edge, Alex's dual-screen display design combines a monochrome electronic paper display with a color LCD screen.
"Periodicals are the next big frontier in eReading," Gil Fuchsberg, president of FirstPaper, said in a statement. To enable better newspaper and magazine reading experiences, e-reading devices will need richer layouts and more complex content, according to FirstPaper.
Corrected on November 3 at 7:40 a.m. PST: This story initially described FirstPaper incorrectly. It is an e-reading and advertising start-up.
1999 Psion Revo Plus PDA looks a lot like MIDs today.
(Credit: Miha Ulanov)The iPhone is a mobile Internet device. Just in case you forgot, ARM wants to remind you that before the Intel Atom processor there was the iPhone and its handful of ARM processors. Yeah, it's a MID too.
Listening to Intel, a casual observer might believe that the world's largest chipmaker is single-handedly creating the class of tiny devices called mobile Internet devices or MIDs.
But ARM processors have been powering small, low-power devices since 1985. There was the Psion series of handhelds, the Apple Newton, Nintendo DS, and, today, products like the Microsoft Zune. All used or use ARM architecture chips.
On a Web page titled Mobile Internet Devices, ARM now posts this marketing message: "It is clear that the future of mobile computing rests in devices that are truly mobile, always connected and providing a rich Internet browsing experience--ARM calls these devices Mobile Internet Devices (MID)." Intel does too.
The Apple iPhone is full of ARM silicon and technically a MID
(Credit: ARM)ARM lists other devices like the Nokia N95, the BlackBerry 8700g, and the Motorola Q. All powered by ARM silicon.
The Web page continues: "ARM licenses the intellectual property that powers MIDs. This includes all the technology required by the chips at the heart of these devices: the microprocessor, digital signal processing, embedded memory, graphics acceleration, (and) fabric interconnect."
And ARM is not exaggerating. If anything ARM is understating the case. As one of the most understated chip architectures today, few consumers know the name. And almost no one listening to their Zune or iPod or talking on their Nokia phone knows that there is ARM silicon inside. But consumers can hardly miss the flashy Intel, AMD, ATI, or Nvidia branding on their PCs.
And this conspicuous PC-style branding strategy will carry over to Intel MIDs and Netbooks too. Lest consumers forget, maybe ARM should do a little more in-your-face branding.
PDAs aren't dead yet. Nor is Intel's XScale chip technology. Hewlett-Packard's new, attractive big-screen handheld packs an application processor that still includes plenty of Intel's XScale DNA.
HP iPAQ 210
(Credit: HP)HP is now shipping production units of the long-awaited iPaq 210 (originally slated to ship last year) that features a 4.0-inch, 640x480 (VGA) resolution screen. The 210 (which is rebranded internationally as the 211, 212, and 214), comes with a Marvell PXA310 processor running at 624MHz, 128MB of memory, and 256MB of flash ROM.
Though Intel sold the business that made XScale processors to Marvell more than a year and a half ago (June 2006), Marvell is still making processors based on Intel technologies. Marvell states that the PXA3xx processor family "is the third generation of applications processors based on Intel's XScale technology." The PXA310, made on a 90-nanometer process, includes Intel SpeedStep technology, Intel Wireless Trusted Module encryption technology, and an Intel Wireless MMX 2 co-processor.
Marvell also makes a PXA320 that can achieve a clock speed of 800 MHz. (See graphic below.)
The iPaq 210 features both compact flash and a SDIO (Secure Digital Input/Output) slots. SDIO cards, more advanced than typical SD memory cards, can house a Bluetooth adapter, Wi-Fi adapter, Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, television tuner, and a number of other devices.
Marvell PXA320
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