ST-Ericsson Symbian-on-A9 demo fails to make it to MWC

BARCELONA, Spain — ST-Ericsson's previously heralded demonstration of the Symbian operating system running on a dual-core Cortex-A9 processor platform did not, after all, make it to the Mobile World Congress or even to Barcelona.

ST-Ericsson had promised the demonstration would happen (see ST-Ericsson set to show multiprocessing Cortex-A9 running Symbian OS).

If it had taken place on schedule on Tuesday (Feb. 17) it would have been an interesting counter-point to the OMAP-4 from Texas Instruments which launched here Tuesday. Of course, OMAP-4 was also here only in spirit as the platform and development tools are not expected to sample until the second half of 2009, with production expected by the second half of 2010.

The latest word on the ST-Ericsson demo is that it is sitting in the newly-formed group's development labs in Geneva, Switzerland. And the demonstration is not of a system-chip as the development is still in an FPGA-phase, according to a source at ST-Ericsson.

A different source that told us yesterday that the demo involved a dual-cored Cortex-A9 implemented on 45-nm CMOS process technology forgot to mention that it was in an FPGA, or even multiple FPGAs.

Much of the hardware aspect of the project has been done in Geneva, but of course, "the key aspect will be the integration of the silicon, operating system and applications, and that will need lots of partnerships." The source told EE Times it would not take long to get the chip into its own dedicated silicon, but actual availability would very much depend on customer demand. Which sounds like it means there is no timetable to ship such a part from ST-Ericsson.

As to the question my colleague Peter Clarke asked regarding who will make the phantom ARM-based multiprocessing SoC, apparently there will, eventually, be multiple sources, including ST's Crolles facility near Grenoble and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in Taiwan.

It seems that ST-Ericsson has failed to do what it said it would do with this particular demo, although there were many other demonstrations going on at the off-site hotel that the company is using as its base during the Mobile World Congress. Many of these demos are targeting multimode multimedia devices, video processing capabilities on mobiles, and readying them for LTE technology.

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