A FRENCH ENGINEER IN DALLAS

When RF engineers talk about silicon they're usually speaking a foreign language. They use obtuse acronyms like CMOS and ARM. They describe performance in terms of operations and calculations per second. And they measure new gains in technological innovation in nanometer increments.

Gilles Delfassy, however, is an exception. Texas Instruments' senior vice president and manager of the wireless terminals division may have the lilting accent of his native France, but when he talks silicon, he uses terms people can understand. He speaks in terms of digital camcorders, high-definition (HD) TV screens and nail-biting 3-D gaming sessions. You'd think Delfassy was building consumer entertainment equipment, but he's not. His job is technically to build the guts of the cell phone. His division creates the digital signal processors (DSPs) that grab radio waves out of the air and convert them into voice conversations and the multimedia processors that handle the growing set of features on the phone that go beyond voice. But his perceptions of the phone go beyond the silicon chips embedded within it.

“The cell phone platform is becoming more and more personal,” Delfassy said. “It reflects the personality and the habits of the person using it. It used to be if you lost your phone, you could get another one and lose nothing. Phones were interchangeable. Now if you lose your phone, you lose your contacts, friends, photos, music … a lot of your life is in that phone. People are developing a close personal attachment to their phones.”

As the man in charge of TI's OMAP multimedia processor platform, Delfassy unveiled the latest version of TI's vision, the OMAP3 family of chipsets, which will bring HD video capabilities, the polygon-rendering power of a stand-alone gaming console and the ability to play CD-quality music to the cell phone. OMAP3 will sample later this year and ship in volume at this time next year. By the end of 2007, the first OMAP3-powered phones will be in the hands of consumers, and that means Delfassy is thinking toward OMAP4 and OMAP5. They may just to be acronyms, but to Delfassy those future platforms represent a complete shift in the way we think about the mobile phone.

The trend of personalization on the device will only continue, Delfassy said, reaching the point where the handset not only mirrors the customer's tastes and preferences for music, entertainment and lifestyle but will become the central electronic tool to which all other devices are peripheral. “The beauty of the cell phone platform is that you have all of these DSP computing resources,” Delfassy said. “They are already in the phone. It doesn't cost any more to use the same resources to power other functions in the device.”

Cell phones today already power video and music; they receive e-mail and take photographs. These certainly aren't new concepts, but the phone has always been viewed as a peripheral device for performing those functions — you don't watch a movie on your phone when a DVD player and a HD TV is available, you don't take a photo with your phone if you have a high-megapixel digital camera at your side. But Delfassy said thinking of the phone as a secondary device is a mistake. The wireless phone easily could replace all of these functions, just like it has gradually displaced the landline phone as the most popular voice communication tool. People may scoff at the idea of watching an HD movie on a tiny screen, as well they should, Delfassy said. They're missing the point: that phone will plug into the HDTV monitor where it is available — the phone, however, is the device that allows you to take that movie with you wherever you go.

“We think you can watch your movies on the phone if you have no other choice, but if another resource is available, you should use it,” Delfassy said.

There are already several examples of what Delfassy is describing. Apple, in just the last few years, has changed the way we think about music with the iPod, which started out as the digital music equivalent of the portable CD or cassette player but gradually turned into the central repository for a user's music collection. iPod users now buy music that they own in no other format except for the file stored on their portable devices. It's not a stretch to imagine that model being extended to the mobile phone, Delfassy said.

“Maybe the ‘cell phone’ is not the proper name for this device anymore,” Delfassy concluded. “It is becoming your personalized storage and entertainment engine. Maybe another name is in order.”