Wistron Licenses Software from India’s Sasken

Taiwan wireless communication equipment maker Wistron NeWeb has licensed high-end multimedia software from Sasken Communication Technologies in Bangalore, India, that will go into its dual-mode phones running the Linux operating system from MontaVista Software.

The dual-mode phones will support both Global System for Mobile Communications and Wi-Fi.

Sasken’s software, called Multimedia Subsystem Solution (MSS), contains all the codecs, engines and applications, such as media player and media capture, that are required for high-end multimedia applications, providing Wistron with a single source for its next-generation multimedia phones, said Edwin Moses, vice president of sales and marketing at Sasken, on Wednesday.

The MSS has been designed with an eye to its reusability across Linux, Symbian’s Symbian, and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating systems, running on a variety of processor architectures, Moses said. Sasken’s Remote Codec Interface architecture provides a level of abstraction that allows the software to be reused with significantly lower effort, he added.

Wistron, a Taiwanese original device manufacturer that supplies its phones mainly to operators, will use Sasken’s software, the OMAP multimedia processor from Texas Instruments, and MontaVista Linux for a series of feature-rich dual-mode phones due for release early next year, Moses said. Sasken will provide integration support to Wistron for the MSS subsystem, Sasken said.

Sasken, which has Intel and Nortel Networks as investors, is a provider of software and support services for the communications industry, and its customers include service providers, semiconductor makers and equipment makers like Nokia.

Sasken already has six other licensees of its MSS, including NEC and Matsushita Electric Industrial, which sells its products under the Panasonic brand. Three of the company’s licensees are already in production, Moses said.

Most of the phones using the MSS were sold by NEC and Matsushita to users of the network of NTT DoCoMo in Japan. Sasken’s tie-up with Wistron, and another two tie-ups with two undisclosed top-branded mobile phone makers outside Japan, indicate that demand for high-performance, multimedia phones is picking up outside Japan, Moses said.

-John Ribeiro, IDG News Service (Bangalore Bureau)

Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage.