ST-Ericsson Selects Movial To Power Snowball

ST-Ericsson has selected Movial to power its Igloo open source developer community and to support the launch of its forthcoming Snowball developer board. As a result, Movial will port both Android and MeeGo to Snowball.

Igloo is an interactive web portal intended as a grounds for collaboration and information exchange on ST-Ericsson’s smartphone and tablet platforms, drawing in ODMs, OEMs and application developers.The battery-operated Snowball developer board, based on ST-Ericsson’s new Nova A9500 application processor, is a production grade pre-integrated solution, designed to streamline and speed up development of mid-to-high end smart devices. Snowball will feature 3D gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, barometer, GPS and connectivity features upon completion.

As Tomi Rauste, president of Movial Creative Technologies, puts it: “Igloo is open to everyone; it’s collaborative, supportive, inclusive and free. ST-Ericsson developer board users can quickly get up to speed, get recommendations for hardware interfaces and peripherals, as well as complete software packages that are already aligned with open source requirements and standards. Igloo gives everyone an opportunity to capitalise on innovation.”

The Nova A9500 has been designed to generate 200 per cent more mobile computing performance than the U8500 platform. Alongside the Nova A9500, ST-Ericsson this week unveiled fellow Nova processors, the Nova A9540 and Nova A9600. The Nova A9540 is a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9-based processor, with each core operating up to 1,8GHz, which is reported to deliver four time the graphic performance of the current generation. The Nova A9600 will the first platform to incorporate Imagination Technologies’ next generation of graphics processors, monikered ‘Rogue’, and the processor is intended to deliver more than a 20-fold improvement in graphics performance compared to U8500.

The company also yesterday launched two of its first modems – Thor M7300 and Thor M7400 - in a range designed to offer manufacturers a means of developing power-efficient devices that can connect to LTE and HSPA+ networks globally, enabling customers to connect to the internet at high speeds, both at home and when roaming. 

The Thor M7400 platform support the latest LTE and HSPA+ dual-carrier technologies and the Thor M7300 supports HSPA+ capabilities up to 84 Mbps, while preserving backward compatibility to existing 3G/2G networks. The new Thor modems feature a highly-integrated radio solution that offers support for up to eight LTE/HSPA/GSM bands within a very small footprint, enabling development of truly global smartphones, tablets and many other mobile broadband-enabled devices. To further optimise footprint the new Thor modems include memory-less technology which is used when combining with an application processor in smartphones. Meanwhile, the two-chip Thor M7300 provides capabilities to further improve the mobile broadband performance timely in sync with the coming dual carrier volume market for smartphones and tablets.

The ThorM7400 and ThorM7300 modems are based on a common architecture, enabling ST-Ericsson and its customers to benefit from shorter time-to-market by re-using of modem certification and application processor interfaces across platforms, reducing time-to-market. The new Thor modems are also pin-to-pin compatible which enables customers to completely reuse their design across the two platforms.

The company has also launched its new NovaThor platforms, based on a scalable architecture,which combine application engines, modems and connectivity chipsets into fully-integrated and tested solutions, which device manufacturers can use to quickly roll out a new wave of advanced smartphones and tablets with high-end multimedia capabilities across all segments.

"As the selection of advanced smartphones and tablets increases we see the need for a wider range of performance points to be addressed," Mike Inglis, executive VP and general manager of ST-Ericsson’s ARM Processor Division,comments. "This announcement shows the performance that can be achieved by combining the Cortex-A15 processor with integrated LTE modems."