TI said it has supplied about 70 percent of baseband chips for GSM/GPRS in the world. Sharp claims to have about 40 percent share in camera modules for mobile phones. The two top suppliers said they would combine their strengths, which are complementary to each other, to develop the reference design for a 1 megapixel camera phone.

"Camera phones accounted less than 6 percent in the world cell phone market, but it will go up to about 20 percent this year. In such a growing market, we are going to offer the optimum solution in which signal interfaces between devices are already tuned," said Yoshiko Sano, group general manger of integrated circuits group of Sharp.

"Demand for camera phones is quite strong, stronger than expected," added Akikazu Okano, president of the Digital Consumer Electronics Solutions Co. of TI Japan. The two companies expected that camera phones would account for more than 50 percent of all cell phones in 2005. "We expect that 1 megapixel will be the mainstream next year," Okano said.

The reference design will combine Sharp's 1 megapixel CCD camera module, flash memory and LCD panel, and TI's TCS2100 baseband chip for GSM/GPRS cell phones along with the OMAP-DM270 multimedia processor. The reference design also supports video compression including Nancy Technology from Office Noa (Tokyo) and MPEG-4.

The collaboration is nonexclusive, but the megapixel reference design is just the first step, said Okano. Demand for higher resolution up to 4 megapixels will follow. "We hope our collaboration will continue to such high resolution products," he said.

The OMAP-DM270 processor is a single-chip digital media processor that integrates the low-power TMS320C54x DSP, the Arm7TDMI Risc processor and coprocessors for video and image processing. DM270 is the first processor developed by Digital Consumer Electronics Solutions Co. which was founded under TI Japan in February 2002 to focus on the development of digital consumer electronics solutions.