Wireless Everywhere
Many CE products need local-area connectivity (e.g. internet enabled televisions to support VoIP and media sharing), and wide-area cellular is increasingly common (e.g. e-book readers and in-car sat-nav). Even in TV tuners where the TV broadcast standards have, until recently, been very stable there is a new growth in different standards and evolution of existing standards to support higher quality and more services.
As the number and range of wireless modems increase this leads to increased cost and development time which challenges competitiveness.
Platform Divergence
Historically, CE products have achieved significant economies of scale due to a single platform / global market approach. However, different regions of the world often use different wireless systems, e.g. DVB vs ISDB vs DTMB broadcast, or TDD cellular in China vs FDD in Europe or the US. Therefore, as the inclusion of wireless connectivity grows beyond the globally available 802.11, this can create a Platform Divergence problem with multiple chip sets and software platforms to develop, validate and maintain, reducing profitability and speed of response to market requirements.
Global Flexibility
The demand for multiple connectivity mechanisms in a wide range of products coupled with the need to maintain a global market focus make the use of a Software Defined Modem approach attractive and in many cases essential. SDM enables one small die-size chip to support many products, markets and wireless technologies, with evolution and update to the wireless mix now possible in software.
