by Anton Shilov
02/27/2013 | 09:51 PM
At the Mobile World Congress, ST-Ericsson demonstrated NovaThor L8580 highly-integrated smartphone platform with a 2.5GHz quad-core application processor and a multimode 4G/LTE advanced modem supporting carrier aggregation. Thanks to special burst mode technologies, the L8580 can increase its clock-speeds to up to 3.0GHz in cases when high performance is needed. The SoC is among the first products to be made using 28nm FD-SOI technology.
The initial commercial version of the NovaThor L8580 integrates a quad-core 2.5GHz processor cluster based on ARM Cortex-A9, Imagination PowerVR SGX544 graphics core running at 600MHz and an advanced multimode 4G/LTE modem supporting carrier aggregation on a single 28nm FD-SOI die. The NovaThor L8580 supports LTE-FDD, LTE-TDD, HSPA+, GSM and TD-SCDMA with downlink speeds up to 150Mb/s in the same chipset as well as VoLTE and HD voice.
“We focused on innovation on real world use cases and delivered a ModAp technology that lets applications run significantly faster – up to 35% faster CPU while GPU and multimedia accelerators run 20% faster. With the NovaThor L8580, ST-Ericsson is bringing speeds normally reserved for the PC market to mobile devices,” said Didier Lamouche, president and CEO of ST-Ericsson.
According to the company, NovaThor L8580 consumes 35% less power than rival architectures at comparable high frequencies. The L8580’s ground breaking 0.6V low power mode consumes 50% less power at 1GHz redefining the active standby experience for users of mobile devices while adding hours of battery life.
“Our next-generation NovaThor platform is creating a disruption for the wireless industry by combining some of the most advanced technologies on the market, including STMicroelectronics’ 28nm FD-SOI process technology, to deliver a real industry breakthrough in terms of speed, power consumption and overall performance,” said Mr. Lamouche.
The complete platform includes multimedia performance and pre-integrated connectivity with support for Bluetooth, GNSS (GPS+ GLONASS), FM, WLAN, WiFi Direct, Miracast and NFC. With ST-Ericsson’s connectivity solutions, CG2905 and CW1260, the platform comes optimized for wireless radio co-existence and low power consumption.
The NovaThor L8580 is pin-to-pin and Software compatible with ST-Ericsson’s first generation NovaThor 4G/LTE multimode platform the L8540.