NovaThor was a platform consisting of integrated System on Chips (SoC) and modems for smartphones and tablets developed by

ST-Ericsson ST-Ericsson was a multinational manufacturer of wireless products and semiconductors, supplying to mobile device manufacturers. ST-Ericsson was a 50/50 joint venture of Ericsson and STMicroelectronics established on 3 February 2009 and dissolved 2 ...

, a 50/50 joint venture of

Ericsson (lit. "Telephone Stock Company of LM Ericsson"), commonly known as Ericsson, is a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm. The company sells infrastructure, software, and services in inform ...

and

STMicroelectronics STMicroelectronics N.V. commonly referred as ST or STMicro is a Dutch multinational corporation and technology company of French-Italian origin headquartered in Plan-les-Ouates near Geneva, Switzerland and listed on the French stock market. ST ...

established on February 3, 2009. ST-Ericsson also sold the SoCs (Nova) and the modems (Thor) separately. The application processor portion of the system was the successor of the previous Nomadik line from STMicroelectronics.

History

In early 2009, when development had already begun on a Nomadik SoC called STn8500, it was superseded by the NovaThor family from

and renamed U8500 as the ST-NXP Wireless division was merged into the ST-Ericsson

joint venture A joint venture (JV) is a business entity created by two or more parties, generally characterized by shared ownership, shared returns and risks, and shared governance. Companies typically pursue joint ventures for one of four reasons: to acces ...

. On November 2, 2011,

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...

announced that NovaThor SoCs will power Nokia's future

Windows Phone Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design lan ...

based smartphones, making a deviation from the standard use of

Qualcomm Snapdragon Snapdragon is a suite of system on a chip (SoC) semiconductor products for mobile devices designed and marketed by Qualcomm Technologies Inc. The Snapdragon's central processing unit (CPU) uses the ARM architecture. A single SoC may include ...

SoCs in Windows Phones. On February 28, 2012, ST-Ericsson announced that they would switch to fully depleted

silicon on insulator In semiconductor manufacturing, silicon on insulator (SOI) technology is fabrication of silicon semiconductor devices in a layered silicon–insulator–silicon substrate, to reduce parasitic capacitance within the device, thereby improving per ...

(FD-SOI) transistors for upcoming products to reduce power consumption. As an example they stated that the L8540 SoC with FD-SOI transistors would consume 35% less power. On April 23, 2012, the company announced that development of application processors (such as NovaThor) was to be moved back into STMicroelectronics. On November 21, 2012, it was announced that ST-Ericsson had joined the

Sailfish Alliance Sailfish OS is a Linux-based operating system based on free software, and open source projects such as Mer as well as including a closed source UI. The project is being developed by the Finnish company Jolla. The OS first shipped with the ...

hence NovaThor ModAp platform would support Jolla's smartphones and Sailfish OS. On December 10, 2012, ST-Ericsson announced that

will leave the joint venture after a transition period making Ericsson the full owner of the company. On December 20, 2012, Ericsson announced that they will not buy the remaining 50% stake that

held. The future for the company therefore remained uncertain. On January 30, 2013, ST-Ericsson announced as part of its quarterly result that they had shipped 10.7 million U8500 NovaThor units in the fourth quarter of 2012. On May 28, 2013, ST-Ericsson announced that they would sell the assets and intellectual property rights for its mobile connectivity

Global Navigation Satellite System A satellite navigation or satnav system is a system that uses satellites to provide autonomous geo-spatial positioning. It allows satellite navigation devices to determine their location (longitude, latitude, and altitude/elevation) to high pr ...

(GNSS) to

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...

for $90 million. On August 5, 2013, Ericsson and STMicroelectronics completed the split up of ST-Ericsson and NovaThor is since a STMicroelectronics product.

List of Nova and NovaThor SoCs

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Notes

References

External links

Page on ST-Ericsson website about NovaThor.

PostmarketOS page for NovaThor phones
- supports contemporary Linux kernels and userspace {{ARM-based chips ARM-based systems on chips