With Spectrum Mobile, get reliable cell phone service and great deals on mobile phone plans. Choose from the newest devices, like Apple iPhone 12, Samsung Galaxy & Google Pixel. ST-NXP Wireless 1,094 followers on LinkedIn. ST-NXP Wireless has been created by bringing together the wireless operations of two of the world’s leading semiconductor companies: STMicroelectronics and NXP. The joint venture between two strong players in the wireless communications semiconductor market combines successful businesses that together generated revenues of around $3B in 2007. At the same time, ST-Ericsson's CEO, Gilles Delfassy, confirmed that the company might not have a chip available for Nokia's Windows Phones (which will run under WP 7.5 Mango), but that the.

Like all other Windows Phone manufacturers, Nokia is using Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM chips in its just-announced Lumia phones. Confirming an earlier statement, Nokia has now stated that it will also make use of the NovaThor system-on-a-chip (SoC) from ST-Ericsson in some of its upcoming Windows Phone devices. When Nokia makes the jump, it will mark the first time a non-Qualcomm SoC powers a Windows Phone. Aside from what must be the most awesome name for a mobile processor, what makes these chips special?

ST-Ericsson does not have the name recognition of a Samsung or Qualcomm, but the company has an impressive pedigree. ST-Ericsson is a joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Ericsson, of Sony-Ericsson fame. While the partnership with Sony is over, its fabless chip design business is just ramping up after being established in 2009.

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NovaThor gets its name from the two separate product lines maintained by ST-Ericsson. Nova is a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 application processor; the same core used in many other current-generation chips. Thor refers to the cellular data modems supplied by ST-Ericsson, which support technologies like HSPA, LTE, and WCDMA. Stick the two together (both figuratively and literally), and we have the NovaThor SoC, which uses the ARM processors in conjunction with a custom Thor modem.

The ARM cores used in NovaThor are licensed directly from ARM Holdings, not custom designs as in the case of Qualcomm. Nearly identical processing components are used in chips like the TI OMAP4 and Samsung Exynos. The NovaThor platform can be clocked at various speeds, but the only variants to actually ship have been set to 1GHz, which is just a little slower than many competing Cortex-A9 chips.

The NovaThor SoCs share a somewhat unusual feature with the Snapdragon chips. Both components have been designed to have the usual SoC elements and the data modem on one piece of silicon. Most chip makers prefer to let OEMs add in a separate data modem of their choosing. Having the cell radios built into the SoC has been good for Qualcomm, which has seen big manufacturers line up to take advantage of its simplified and space-saving platform. It’s no surprise Nokia wants to get these chips in Windows Phones.

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Another important part of any SoC, and one that is getting more scrutiny in the wake of the Galaxy Nexus announcement, is the GPU. Texas Instruments uses PowerVR, Qualcomm uses Adreno, and ST-Ericsson uses ARM Mali-400. This is a surprisingly robust mobile GPU, and has gained some notoriety by pushing the pixels for Samsung’s Exynos SoC. Mali scales anywhere from one to four cores, and we don’t currently know exactly how ST-Ericsson has implemented it. Varying GPU cores may be how the different NovaThor models are segmented.

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It has been speculated that NovaThor will be used in Nokia’s low-end devices next year, but keep in mind that these chips are currently much faster than any Qualcomm SoC in a Windows Phone. The NovaThor was shipped in a Chinese model HTC Sensation several weeks back, and it was certainly able to stand in for a Snapdragon S3 there. In fact, NovaThor is not terribly dissimilar from Samsung’s Exynos chip when the component choices are examined. If Nokia is successful with this chip, be ready for ST-Ericsson to start competing against the more established SoC makers, and that’s a good thing in our book.