Broadcom unveils Android 4.0 optimized chips for ‘affordable’ smartphones

With more and more devices supporting Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Broadcom has announced a trio of chips designed specifically to take advantage of Google’s latest mobile OS — but without breaking the bank. With its new line, Broadcom says smartphone makers will be able to “affordably” deliver a solid Ice Cream Sandwich experience, and the three different chips will support different tiers of devices. The high-end BCM28145 and BCM28155 chips, for instance, feature dual ARM Cortex A9 cores clocked at up to 1.3 GHz, as well as Broadcom’s VideoCore graphics engine, which supports playback and recording at up to 1080p. Meanwhile, the lower-end BCM21654G includes ARM Cortex A9 processing at 1GHz and support for low-power VGA video. However, it could be some time before we see these platforms in actual devices, as Broadcom isn’t expected to begin production until the second half of this year.