Spansion Verifies Compatibility of Flash Solutions With Popular Cellular Phone Reference Design

January 31, 2005

Compatible Solutions Can Reduce Design Complexity and Unleash Greater Innovation for Cellular Handset Designers

Spansion LLC, the Flash memory subsidiary of AMD and Fujitsu Limited, today announced it has verified the compatibility of its Flash memory solutions with the Philips Nexperia Cellular System Solution 5100, a popular multimedia-enabled GSM/GPRS cellular phone reference design. By verifying that their products work together "off-the-shelf," Spansion and Philips now offer a development platform that can drive down the cost and complexity of cellular handset design, while helping to enable increasingly feature-rich products at more accessible price points.

System designers typically undertake the costly and time-consuming process of testing and validating memory products with logic chipsets. The exponential growth in Flash memory and logic chipset options presents designers with the daunting challenge of having to validate and test potentially thousands of device combinations. By providing compatible solutions, Philips and Spansion will enable customers to spend their time and resources more wisely, developing innovative new features and capabilities more cost effectively.

“Our goal is to not only provide optimized memory solutions, but to support those solutions with the value-added memory services needed by our customers,” said Amir Mashkoori, senior vice president and general manager of Spansion’s Wireless Business Unit. “Ultimately, this collaboration will raise the bar for what cell phone designers require out of their development platform – streamlined memory testing that reduces design complexity and enables them to focus on bringing greater innovation to their designs.”

Spansion’s recently expanded global systems engineering capabilities have made it possible for the company to undertake system-level memory testing for Philips Nexperia System Solution’s users. Spansion’s team works with platform developers around the world to help ensure that all of a phone’s subsystems can utilize Spansion™ Flash products to their fullest potential. Spansion has already pre-qualified a variety of memory configurations and technologies for Philips Nexperia System Solutions. The company plans to continue its work in this area, conducting system-level testing and pre-qualifying its Flash memory devices for other popular development platforms over time.

“Spansion has worked closely with Philips at the semiconductor systems level to provide technology, testing, resources and software support, which allows Philips to sell a flexible and customized system solution to a variety of manufacturers,” said Mario Rivas, executive vice president, Communications Business, Philips Semiconductors. “This collaboration further enhances Philips’ goal to make mobile multimedia simple and accessible.”

Philips’ Nexperia Cellular System Solutions are a fast, cost-effective way to bring a multimedia phone to market. Each Nexperia solution is a carefully designed combination of powerful core hardware and software. Built around a highly flexible platform-based architecture, each solution can be extended with connectivity and multimedia-rich features for completely tailored performance.