Sandbridge Technologies, a Californian fabless chip company developing multimode baseband/multimedia processors for mobiles, has signed agreements with independent 4G software developers, including UK-based 4M Wireless for 3G LTE software stacks.

It has also signed agreements with mimoOn and Seasolve for its mobile Wimax software.

The San Jose-based chip developer will integrate the software into its Sandblaster-based SB3500 programmable silicon platform.

"This enables us to build an ecosystem of third party software around the SB3500 platform," said Tanuj Raja, v-p business development for the company.
 
Using a programmable chip as a multimode baseband processor is seen as an alternative to traditional fixed DSP baseband processors from companies such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments.

The DSP approach has dominated mobile phone baseband design to date, but with next generation smartphones such as the Apple iPhone companies are looking to adopt the more flexible approach of running third party IP on a programmable device.
  
Sandbridge uses a proprietary multi-threaded architecture with more than 30Gmacs of re-usable processor performance. This is used to support broadband data transfer rates specified by the LTE and mobile WiMAX protocols, as well as legacy 3G and 2G systems.

The level of performance also means the device can perform uninterrupted, switchable operations, supporting voice, broadband, Bluetooth, GPS and mp3 or video simultaneously