Software Trumps Hardware

One of the chal­lenges fac­ing the wire­less world is the con­stant change in for­mats and the fact that most wire­less devices have to include spe­cial­ized hard­ware in order to sup­port those for­mat. As a result, uptake on new wire­less for­mat can often be slow in the mobile phone indus­try as it rep­re­sents a typ­i­cal chicken or egg prob­lem: the tel­cos will not build new infra­struc­tures until devices are avail­able to con­sumers, and device man­u­fac­tur­ers will not build until the infra­struc­ture is in place. In comes Vanu, a new com­pany that is propos­ing a rad­i­cal new con­cept: the soft­ware based radio. The idea is that most of the func­tions related to man­ag­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion would be rel­e­gated to soft­ware instead of being hard coded into hard­ware. It could rep­re­sent a real rev­o­lu­tion in the way telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems are built and could even­tu­ally reduce the cost of pro­duc­tion for those devices. The rea­son is that man­u­fac­turer could include such soft­ware into their phones and not have to worry about upcom­ing stan­dards rel­e­gated their devices to the trash bin. Right now, when a mobile device man­u­fac­turer sells a new prod­uct, that prod­uct includes sev­eral chips to man­age each of the dif­fer­ent for­mat (GSM, TDMA, CDMA, etc…) Using a soft­ware based solu­tion would allow to reduce the amount of hard­ware needed and han­dle all this for­mat man­age­ment by using software.

It’s an inter­est­ing trend and one that reminds me of some of the early efforts by Trans­meta, which intro­duced the con­cept of a software-based com­puter chip. In both cases, engi­neers looked at a prob­lem and real­ized that the best way to address it was to use soft­ware instead of hard cod­ing the solu­tion into hardware.

This, of course, rep­re­sents a com­pro­mise in a way as soft­ware based solu­tions can­not be as opti­mized as hard­ware based ones. On the other hand, they are offer­ing cheaper alter­na­tive to build­ing devices. If you look at today’s world, there are mil­lions (if not bil­lions) of chips with pro­pri­etary solu­tion tied into them. Will we see a day when those chips become com­mod­ity and soft­ware becomes more of the way to go?