Broadcom developing chipsets to bring 4G to low-cost smartphones

This year’s Mobile World Congress will see an LTE that’s more mature than ever, with higher speeds, more device selection and more chip suppliers adding to the range of options for the fast mobile technology. While Qualcomm still dominates the field in LTE smartphone chips, other suppliers are nipping at its heels. Broadcom, a fierce rival just up the freeway from Qualcomm, will put its LTE efforts front and center at the show later this month. It previewed the goods on Monday by announcing what it called a turnkey platform for midpriced or even low-priced smartphones. Broadcom can use the same platform with a dual-core SoC (system on a chip), the M320, and a quad-core design, the M340. It’s already shipping the dual-core product to phone makers in sample quantities, and it plans to sample the quad-core silicon later in the first half of the year.