Renesas Considers Taking FOMA Global

According to this report, Renesas is interested in offering the FOMA platform as a handset reference design to companies outside Japan. FOMA, or Freedom of Mobile Multimedia Access, is Docomo’s 3G network standard design followed all Japanese handset makers that provide cellphones to DoCoMo. Considering the vested interest of Renesas in SH-Mobile this ‘news’ is not surprising. However, it does indicate that more players and products are gearing up for the shift towards LTE.

“There is an interest to take the FOMA platform outside Japan,” said Matthew Trowbridge, CEO of Renesas Technology Europe. At present Renesas offers discrete SH-Mobile baseband and application processors which have to be integrated with other RF and memory subsystems to produce a mobile phone.

Trowbridge said the move to Long-Term Evolution (LTE) was likely to be pioneered in Japan and this would encourage a shift of application processor support to high definition graphics on mobile phones. Trowbridge said the evolution of the mobile phone market would need the FOMA platform to be offered more widely. “It’s not something we have at the moment outside Japan. But we have 180 engineers in Munich offering FOMA support for the Docomo platform that would be able to offer support outside Japan.”