The Adaptive Wireless Engine, as it is called, is a device whose logic cells have been specifically designed to handle signal filtering, speech encoding, wireless communications protocols, and so on in other words, the sorts of things that mobile phones have to do.

ECONOMIST: Hardware goes soft

Scientific-Atlanta and Motorola locked up the box market by controlling--in the name of antipiracy--the encoding software that scrambles a video signal at the cable company's hub and descrambles it at the home.

FORBES: Sony busts up the powerful cable-box duopoly.

Three years ago Sony began developing technology that grabs the video signal before it goes into the hub and, rather than encoding the whole thing, as the duopolists do, encodes just the right amount, between 2% and 10%, to thwart piracy.

FORBES: Sony busts up the powerful cable-box duopoly.