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Sunday, Jan 08, 2006

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National

Indian circuits fuel global smart phone solution

Anand Parthasarathy

Xilinx uses iWave's circuit boards

iWave's board (right), sporting Xilinx devices, shows all the electronics needed for a smart phone.

BANGALORE: Xilinx, the United States-based leader in making programmable chips, has used the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to offer a fast track for mobile handset manufacturers to launch new generation "smart" phones.

And to do this, it turned to a Bangalore-based product developer, iWave, to come up with a demonstration platform which shows how the needs of small size and low power consumption could be met, even while offering features such as cameras, wireless capability and the Internet. iWave created a special version of its Intel-based processor board to harness the power and flexibility of Xilinx's "CoolRunner" and "programmable logic devices" — jargon for chips which could be reworked by the designer to suit multiple applications.

Demo board

A Xilinx release on Friday says that the iWave demo board shows "how designers can quickly integrate new smart handset requirements such as external memory, high resolution displays and embedded hard disk drives." The CoolRunner chips allow all this to be done without extra power.

The Xilinx-iWave partnership is symbolic of the new confidence that global device manufacturers are displaying in fairly small India-based product designers to realise major development targets.

iWave has earlier seen its "Rainbow" platform fuelling a number of specialist hand-held computer and communication applications.

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