Industrial Technology Research Institute ( ITRI ) is a national research organization that serves to strengthen the technological competitiveness of Taiwan. In response to industry’s demand for SoC (System-on-a-Chip) technology, ITRI setup the SoC Technology Center (STC) in the form of a task-force unit for specific programs. STC became a formal research center in 2003 and now is one of ITRI’s five focus centers.

STC devotes itself to engage in the research and development of SoC technology and the implementation of product applications for having industrial impacts. ITRI STC’s primary focuses of technology development are 32-bit high-end PAC (Parallel Architecture Core) DSP series and WiMAX SoC and platform.

In the future, the achievement of single-core PAC DSP technologies has been extended into the domains of multi-core DSP, PAC-plus, and PAC-lite technologies. The development of WiMAX chip technologies will be further developed, from SISO to MIMO, and from 802.16e-2005 to 802.16m standard. By integrating RF and baseband core technologies, those can be applied toward future WiMAX-enabled PxD applications.
You can watch this video of ITRI Mobile WiMAX solution.

Recently STC unveiled the world’s first built-in WiMAX chip with the Android operating platform for personal mobile Internet devices PID ( Personal Internet Device). The PID re-brand what Intel has tried to popularize with its MID (mobile Internet device), a mobile device similar to a smartphone but made for Internet use, not phone calls. The main difference between a PID and an MID is that the PID uses microprocessors from Arm Holdings instead of Intel.

The WiMAX-enabled PID is built using MW 1100 MIMO Mobile WiMAX Terminal System SoC developed by ITRI, and will carry a price tag below NT$8,000 (US$243) when it enters commercial production, ITRI said.

“We chose Android because we didn’t need to do a lot of additional work on it. The kernel is there, the software is already done. We just optimized it for our PID,” said Wu Cheng-wen, general director of ITRI STC. ITRI spent nearly a year tweaking the Android OS on the board and will pass it out freely to developers.

You can watch the launching video of ITRI’s Android WiMAX-enabled PID.

It’s good to know that WiMAX integrated with Android and not only Intel+Win plaftorm.

Congrats ITRI STC !

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