Designing Mobile Devices – Modern Processors Overview

The slogan “More GHz for less energy consumption” has become a motto in the development of the modern market of mobile devices – exactly this movement vector has led to the appearance of new low-power processors with integrated multimedia interfaces on chips, created especially for this segment of devices. In spite of the fact that solutions on the basis of ARM architecture have already become de-facto a standard in mobile electronics a long time ago, chip manufacturers keep surprising users and developers by capabilities of their processors (SoC – systems-on-chip).
Promwad Innovation Company reviews the most popular processors and software platforms for mobile devices capable of satisfying even the boldest demands of both product companies and consumers.

Samsung processors

Samsung is one of the indisputable leaders in the market of mobile electronics – it produces highly-integrated systems-on-chip (SoC) built on the basis of ARM926-EJS and ARM920 processor cores. The family of S3Cxxxx processors is designed for application in portable and embedded devices – smartphones, pocket computers and navigators (PDA and PND), etc. The fact that Samsung also manufactures Flash and SDRAM memory gives it a certain advantage in price and form-factor. This is particularly obvious for SoCs used in mobile phones where PiP (Package-in-Package) and Stackable Package technologies are applied (i.e. RAM, Flash and processor in one package).

The official distributor of Samsung solutions in Russian Federation is MT-System. You can find more detailed overview of solutions provided by Samsung on the web-site of Promwad Innovation Company in the Technologies section.

Freescale processors

Another favorite is Freescale, who follows the policy of consecutive development of its ARM processors from the i.MX family – specially designed for application in smartphones, portable media players, navigation devices and in many other consumer, industrial and medical embedded systems. Built on the basis of different ARM® core versions (ARM9, ARM11 and ARM Cortex A8) i.MX family is created with application of Smart Speed technology providing high performance with low power consumption.

Freescale i.MX processors support a range of popular platforms such as Microsoft Windows® CE and Mobile, Linux® OS, QNX Netrino® and other less popular RTOSes.

You can find more detailed overview of solutions provided by Freescale on the web-site of Promwad Innovation Company in the Technologies section.

Marvell processors

Marvell has become a remarkable player in the market of processors for mobile devices after purchasing XScale technology and PXA family from Intel. Further development of XScale has led to the appearance of high-performance and low-power Sheeva architecture.

Marvell has developed PXA processor family as low-cost family offering a wide choice of capabilities of chips, which are software- and pip-to-pin compatible. The main features of Marvell XScale microprocessors are a wide set of embedded communication devices, support of signal processing at core level, low energy consumption and small size with quite high performance.

You can find more detailed overview of solutions from Marvell company on the web-site of Promwad Innovation Company in the Technologies section.

Software platforms for mobile devices

It is certain that all power and diversity of interfaces and capabilities of System-on-Chip can be only implemented in full extent only by applying developed operating systems together with modern software platform meeting modern requirements of the market of mobile devices.

Today many large vendors have realized the benefits of using Linux operating system in their multimedia devices and are actively sponsoring development of entire software platforms for mobile portable devices. Different consortiums were created for promoting software platforms on the basis of Linux. The most popular and developed among them are – Moblin, Android and Maemo.

Moblin platform was developed as open project of Intel for promoting Linux on Intel Atom hardware platform. In April 2009 Intel transferred project management to non-commercial organization ‘Linux Foundation’. The peculiar features of this platform are:

application of high-level graphical Clutter library for advanced user interface with 3D effects and animation;
fast-boot and power-save technologies specific for Intel Atom processors;
GUPnP library for creating UpnP compatible devices and services.

Google has developed its own variant of software platform for mobile phones – Android. Open Handset Alliance (OHA) consortium was created for managing and promoting this open platform. User applications are developed with the help Android SDK in Java programming language. Then, Java bite-code is transformed into native bite-code of dex format and is run by Dalvik virtual machine.

Maemo platform (marketing name of the operating system – Internet Tablet) represents an operating system and a set of application working mostly on mobile internet tablets manufactured by Nokia. The platform includes integrated stack of system software, applications and libraries (from Linux core to Maemo API and Hildon User Interface libraries) and also developer’s SDK.

You can find more detailed information about modern software platforms for mobile devices on the web-site of Promwad Innovation Company in the Technologies section.