Agere focusing on music chips

Agere is placing its bets on mobile music, announcing today its new line of entry-level GSM/EDGE chip will support full CD-quality music playback out of the box.

The new TureNTRY X125 platform has a total billable cost of materials of $30, targeting the entry level devices under $100 which many carriers give away free with a service contract. But unlike previous entry-level baseband chipsets, the new solution contains all of the components necessary to support the download and playback of digital music except for the basic storage components.

Agere Mobility Division strategic marketing director Mary Cramer said music presents the perfect opportunity for vendors to build and carriers to offer a reasonably priced handset with advanced data capabilities. While camera phones were intended to fit that bill several years ago, the picture quality of almost all entry-level camera phones left much to be desired. Not so with music phones, Cramer said.

“A camera phone isn’t really a converged device—it’s a phone with a bad camera,” Cramer said. “In this case though, we can make a phone with a good-quality music player that’s still affordable.”

The low cost of the X125 platform and its future iterations will make it Agere’s standard chipset for new devices going forward allowing its OEM partners to make music a basic offering on all of their handsets, Cramer said. Agere has built almost every component into the chipset necessary to support a music playback service, including integrated stereo and speaker amplifiers, polyphonic sound synthesizers, Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0 for side loading music files and power management supporting all the phones peripherals.

The chipset also has a dedicated application processor to power music applications so a phone can access the web and received phone calls while playing music. The only aspect not included in the silicon is data memory, which can often be one of the more expensive aspects of the device. The chipset, however, fully supports internal and external Flash memory, allowing a handset vendor to build robust digital music players or a device that can store a few dozen song tracks.