Because these players have invested so heavily in the integrated ASIC approach, they have been more inclined to milk the R&D assets they have built around this, instead of moving rapidly toward SDR. In a recently published report, ARCchart examined the unique set of challenges posed by some of these new waveforms:
- Mobile TV waveforms require dedicated antennas, RF front-end, baseband and codecs
- LTE places enormous performance pressure on the antenna and RF front-end, requiring them to dynamically switch center frequencies, bandwidths, power scheduling as well as data rates
- UWB requires extraordinary performance from the RF front-end to be able to process a bandwidth of 500 MHz
- GPS antennas have specific structural and orientation requirements
The technical challenges of implementing these technologies will catalyze the shift to SDR. ARCchart believes that SDR will first be adopted in smartphones as these devices will be better able to absorb the higher cost of early SDR implementation. Across all devices, ARCchart estimates that SDR phone shipments will grow to more than 11% of the market in 2011, with Western Europe and <‾xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = 'urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags' />North America being early adopter markets.
Matt Lewis is research director of ARCchart