Semiconductor industry backs Symbian

Symbian more than doubles support from semiconductor industry. Agilent; Epson; Parthus; Philips Semiconductor; Samsung and STMicroelectronics join semiconductor partner programme - fuelling innovation and broadening the market for Symbian OS phones

London, UK - 20 February 2002 - Symbian today announced that six leading semiconductor companies have joined its Semiconductor Partner Programme, demonstrating silicon industry support for Symbian OS running on the ARM^® architecture. This industry standardisation on Symbian OS and ARM core-based chipsets enables Symbian OS licensees to reduce development cycles to bring next generation mobile phones rapidly to market and, through optimisation, improve the performance and power consumption of Symbian OS phones to make them more attractive for end users.

The six new semiconductor partners are: Agilent Technologies; Epson; Parthus; Philips Semiconductors; Samsung and STMicroelectronics. These join existing partners ARM; Intel; Motorola SPS; Qualcomm CDMA Technologies and Texas Instruments.
Symbian will work closely with these partners to migrate Symbian OS to their ARM core-based silicon solutions. In turn, the new partners will provide development tools and board support packages to enable the creation of Symbian OS phones, further reducing time-to-market for handset manufacturers looking to deliver next generation mobile phones. In addition, partners will be provided with access to Symbian Technical Consulting.

"This will be the year in which the market for advanced mobile phones begins to gain serious momentum," said Gilles Allain, VP of Account Management and Partnerships at Symbian. "These more powerful phones will require high-performance processors in order to power the advanced applications which they run. ARM core-based semiconductor solutions that are optimised for Symbian OS provide the necessary processing power, and enable handset manufacturers to increase the speed at which they can develop new handsets."

"The Symbian OS, with its use of the ARM architecture memory management unit (MMU), provides a rich and secure platform for future wireless application and services," said Steve Evans, VP Segment Marketing, ARM. "The ARM architecture has been specifically designed to provide the optimum balance between performance, cost and power consumption for products such as 2.5G and 3G mobile phones. With the support of these additional silicon manufacturers, handset manufacturers will have a broad choice in their selection of an ARM core-based system-on-chip (SoC) for next-generation wireless products."

"As an ARM licensee and leading supplier of ICs to the wireless industry, we believe that Symbian OS is highly robust and well suited to the requirements of next generation mobile phones," said Bryan Ingram, business unit manager of Agilent Technologies' Wireless Semiconductor Division.

"Epson is pleased to join the Symbian Semiconductor Partner Programme," said Kevin Gillett, director of Systems Integration, Epson Research and Development, Inc.. "Epson is well known for developing low power mobile semiconductors which complement Symbian OS, and we look forward to porting our current products and developing new products that support this exciting operating system."

"Clearly Symbian is the operating system of choice for the world's leading mobile phone manufacturers," said Sean Mitchell, VP of Applications Processing, Parthus Technologies. "We are delighted to be extending our very successful partnership. Not only can we supply the semiconductor industry with Symbian-powered smartphone IP platforms today, but are actively extending what Symbian smartphones can support into key applications such as Java, security, location and broadband wireless connectivity."

"As increasing numbers of handset manufacturers commit to Symbian OS, they are also demanding optimised, high-quality semiconductors which deliver the necessary performance and processing power," said Mr Hans Rijns, general manager of Mobile Communications Platform, Philips Semiconductors. "Philips Semiconductors is delighted to be joining the Semiconductor Partner Programme and is working closely with Symbian to provide silicon system solutions, built upon the ARM architecture, to mobile phone manufacturers."

"Within the next 5 years Samsung is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the convergence of wireless , mobile computing and multimedia technologies," said Yun tae Lee, VP of SoC R&D Centre at Samsung Electronics. "We believe that Symbian OS, optimised to our SoC silicon platforms, based on the latest ARM architecture, coupled with our advanced process technology, will help deliver the best power, performance and cost competitive solutions into the market, and by joining Symbian's Semiconductor Partner Programme we will ensure that Symbian licensees will have the most competitive solution for next generation mobile devices."

"As the leading operating system for ARM architectures, Symbian OS is a natural choice for STMicroelectronics system-on-chip solutions for next generation mobile terminals," said Aldo Romano, general manager of STMicroelectronics' Telecommunications and Peripheral/Automotive Groups. "This choice confirms our support for the open platform approach to mobile multimedia, an approach that will accelerate the deployment of new services."

About the Symbian Semiconductor Partner Programme

Symbian works closely with semiconductor vendors that provide silicon solutions to mobile phone manufacturers based around the ARM architecture. This allows semiconductor manufacturers to gain in-depth knowledge of the architectural hardware requirements of Symbian OS technology. With common hardware architectures, the process of producing new products becomes simpler for Symbian OS licensees, resulting in significant reductions in product time-to-market. The Semiconductor Partner Program also enables Symbian OS to be evaluated and benchmarked on partners' development boards incorporating new silicon solutions.
Partners

About Symbian

Symbian supplies an operating system to the world's leading mobile phone manufacturers enabling them to create mobile phones which combine voice communications, wireless Internet access and computing functionality. Ericsson, Nokia and Psion are already shipping Symbian OS devices. Other licensees of Symbian OS include Fujitsu, Kenwood, Motorola, Panasonic, Sanyo, Siemens and Sony. For more information on Symbian see the  Symbian  

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