Reuters
Intel and Motorola join Nokia-backed chip alliance
Wednesday February 4, 12:21 pm ET
By Eric Auchard

NEW YORK, Feb 4 (Reuters) - Intel and Motorola are among 35 companies that have agreed to join an industry alliance created by top mobile phone maker Nokia and three key chip suppliers to help the industry simplify how new phones are designed.

Intel Corp. (NasdaqNM:INTC - News), the world's largest semiconductor maker, and Motorola Inc. (NYSE:MOT - News), the No. 2 supplier of mobile phones, are joining the Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI) Alliance founded by Nokia (NOK1V.HE), Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN - News), STMicroelectronics (Paris:STM.PA - News) and ARM (London:ARM.L - News) in July.

The four founding members of MIPI said they had formed the alliance to spur development of a wider range of wireless features and to guard against any one industry player dominating the new generation of phones.

Wireless equipment makers are hoping to quicken demand for a new generation of mobile phones that offer Internet and computer features and not just voice calling.
The 39 members of the alliance include five of the top six mobile phone handset makers and four of the top five companies in the wireless semiconductor industry.

Other members include Philips Electronics of the Netherlands, Renesas Technologies of Japan, Samsung Electronics of Korea, Siemens of Germany, Toshiba of Japan. Vimicro, a maker of chips for the Chinese market used to control images and other multimedia functions on phones, also joined.

Other companies include phone, hardware and software vendors that are looking to help define the technology building-blocks that will help create new phone features.

Common rules are needed because the wide variety of phones, networks and software can fail to work together properly when using advanced services such as picture messaging, e-mail, calendars, games and video camera phones.

In contrast to the computer industry -- where hundreds of thousands of product developers are able to build products to run on a single basic standard dominated by Microsoft in software and Intel in hardware -- the mobile phone industry has hundreds of suppliers but few common product standards.