Barcelona - Korea's Samsung Electronics, U.K. chip designer ARM and U.S.-based Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) separately announced plans on Monday to introduce mobile products based on Google's (NASD: GOOG) Android mobile phone software platform, with the latter planning to introduce a prototype this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Cambridge, Mass. - Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) have developed a new chip design for portable electronics that can be up to ten times more energy-efficient than present technology, according to an announcement on Monday. The key to the improvement in energy efficiency was to find ways of making the circuits on the chip work at a voltage level much lower than usual, according to the announcement. "While most current chips operate at around 1 volt, the new design works at just 0.3 volts. The design could lead to cell phones, implantable medical devices and sensors that last far longer when running from a battery" the announcement states.

Orlando, Fla. - Texas Instruments announced on Monday that it will demonstrate its new DLP "pico-projector," a tiny video projector that can potentially be integrated into cell phones, digital cameras and portable media players, at the 2007 CTIA Wireless convention this week in Orlando. "Over the next few years, we envision a large opportunity for the convergence of projection technology and mobile devices, like cell phones," said Frank J. Moizio, worldwide strategic marketing and business development manager, TI DLP Front Projection.

Las Vegas - Texas Instruments' DLP Cinema unit on Tuesday introduced its new .98 DLP Cinema chip, which the company said is housed in a smaller, more efficient cabinet and outputs up to 18,000 lumens. TI added that its DLP Cinema projectors saw a 350% increase in global deployments in 2006, a year in which the 18 top-grossing films were released in digital format and shown on its projectors.

Las Vegas - Texas Instruments announced that it has developed technology that can turn a cell phone into a powerful digital video projector. The cell phone projector add-on, which uses the same DLP technology found in TI's cinema-grade digital projectors, measures about 1.5-inches and can transmit DVD-quality video stored on the phone onto a white screen or wall. "You could actually drive a large-screen TV," TI CEO Rich Templeton told CNET News.com. TI also said its DLP digital cinema projectors have now been deployed in over 3,000 movie theater screens worldwide.