Nazomi claims design wins with Korean carrier

Nazomi claims design wins with Korean carrier
By Rick Merritt, EE Times
August 21, 2003 (3:39 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030821S0040

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Nazomi Communications said its JA108 Java and multimedia accelerator has been approved for use as part of SK Telecom's Giga platform, a next-generation cellular handset specification with 3-D graphics and animation capabilities.

Nazomi's JA108 accelerator has been designed into cellphones built to the Giga spec by Samsung and SK Teletech (Seoul), the company said.

SK Telecom is South Korea's largest cellular service provider, serving about 17 million subscribers with its CDMA-based system. It's Giga spec, released in May, details 3-D graphics and a Macromedia Flash-like animation capability as part of a hybrid Java and native software environment.

Jay Kamdar, chief operating officer and vice president of marketing for Nazomi (Santa Clara, Calif.), claimed the company has now shipped accelerators worth $2 million to cellphone makers in South Korea and hopes to gain design wins with three other handset suppliers to SK T elecom. However, he also expects SK Telecom will specify other accelerators and applications processors as compliant with its Giga spec in the future.

The win marks an important beachhead for the startup at a time when many major cellphone makers are eschewing standalone Java accelerators. At the Java One conference in June engineers from Motorola, Nokia and Siemens said they were moving to ARM's Jazelle instruction set extensions for Java hardware acceleration.

In this environment, Nazomi has positioned itself as an applications processor, speeding up not only Java but wavelet and other multimedia functions.