The Hindu Business Line : Adaptive chips to add zing to cell phones

EVERY once in a while you meet a friend or a colleague displaying the `gift' that he has got from abroad: a swank new cell phone. But, he isn't exactly smiling. Reason. The phone doesn't work on the local network and attempts to `fix' the relevant software have slim chances of success.

Why can't they make a mobile phone that works anywhere, you wonder. The good news is recent innovations in integrated circuit (IC) design and development have resulted in the production of Adaptive Computing Machine, a digital chip that can not only solve this problem, but has much more to offer.

"Facilitating seamless roaming and staying connected is only one of ACM's abilities. It can change its architecture on-the-fly and create a new hardware engine for each task that you perform and at lower costs and less power consumption," says Mr Kota Bhaskar, of the Chip maker, QuickSilver Technology, US, the pioneers of the Adaptive Computing Machine (ACM).

In other words, a single mobile device can change itself at rapid speed into a phone, camera, fax machine or even an MP3 player, if you prefer.

Yes, you can browse the net on the go and you don't need a separate global positioning system (GPS) module to stay connected.

While the present crop of integrated mobile devices have different chips to perform each of its functions, devices in future will need only an embedded ACM to experience the "what you need, when and wherever you need it" level of communication.

For the basic level mobile user perhaps it can be illustrated best by this example. In the currently available mobile gadgets, let's say you have to do three routine applications like search the local cell site, verify whether its an authorised user and then get the connection to make a conversation happen. You need a rather big, power-hungry chip, which is less flexible and take more time to process, to aid you.

This could well be on its way out, if the ACM has its way. The adaptive chip machine is driven by software instructions to assume different roles in response to the demands and perform all the three functions listed above at rapid pace.

The net result would be that today's handsets would be transformed into mobile communicators with data/voice/image/video applications and necessary features to call, page, e-mail, access Internet from anywhere and anytime in the world.

The ACM is claimed to be the next generation technology when compared to the conventional IC technologies like microprocessors, digital signal processing (DSP), application specific ICs (ASIC), or the filed programmable gate array (FPGAs), Mr Bhaskar told Business Line here recently.

QuickSilver Technology is in talks with major US and Japanese technology makers to translate this `awesome' power of the adaptive chipset into consumer products that can change the way people use communications, he said.

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