ABSTRACT
If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as a computer, a Rolls-Royce today would cost $100 and give a million miles per gallon.
—Robert X. Cringely, American writer
The chip set industry in the past has been benchmarked by Moore’s Law, which predicted that the component density and computing power of devices will double every 18 months. True to form the industry has kept pace with the predictions. However, few, including Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel, himself, could have imagined the new challenges the industry would be grappling with the mobile world. It was no longer about processing power alone, which was needed in hundreds of millions of instructions per second (MIPS) in any case. The mobile industry demanded low power consumption and a single chip for all functionalities, including receiver, decoder, processor, players, display, drivers, et al. And to top it off, it demanded that the same chip also do it for every standard of mobile TV, be it DVB-H, terrestrial DMB (T-DMB), DAB-IP, or even DVB-T. And finally it had to be cheap. As an ultimate demand, 18 months could no longer be permitted for such changes to be ushered in. In 18 months the industry changes beyond recognition.
