The sharp increase in the number of radio standards that modern mobile phones have to support is proving to be a design nightmare for chip designers, and things are going to get increasingly complicated in the future, according to EE Times. Today’s phones need to have a wide area wireless radio, an FM radio, a bluetooth, 802.11 and in some places the digital television for mobile radio included in the handset. Coming soon Ultra wideband and Zigbee. “There are simply too many wireless standards around. Just to get a technical understanding of how they are different and how you might market them to a user is difficult,” laments Jaap Haartsen, a chief scientist in the mobile-platforms group at Ericsson in Sweden. Others say that these many radios are too difficult to implement even in a laptop type environment, forget the handset. Solution is in Software Defined Radios, but will that technology come to market soon enough to free the phone from this radio madness? Who knows!