What makes your smartphone smart? One key ingredient is the application processor that enables the devices to run the applications that are often so impressive.
The makers of these processors—and indeed, the companies that make the designs that go into these processors—keep adding new features. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) show, many were showing off their products and talking about where mobile processors would be going in the future.
Sometimes the applications processors get what you might call brand names: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, Texas Instruments’ OMAP, and Nvidia’s Tegra come to mind. But often they are fairly anonymous components, identified only by part number or speed, if that. Still, their increasing power is necessary for the advanced applications we now want to run on our mobile devices.
Keep in mind that a typical smartphone contains a number of hardware components, and there are many different ways of packaging them. In addition to an applications processor, a smartphone would also need a baseband chip (to connect with the 3G network), probably other communications chips (for Bluetooth, GPS functions, and Wi-Fi, for example), and possibly a separate graphics processor, along with memory for the base operating system, applications, and user data. Many of the component makers combine some of these functions, so the companies that make hardware mix and match to get the right combination for the phone they are making and the software they want it to run.
Nearly every smartphone on the market contains an application processor based on processor cores from ARM. (ARM says 2.5 billion chips with ARM cores shipped last year, and the typical phone has at least two.) ARM doesn’t make chips itself; instead, it creates intellectual property in the form of designed-for-processor cores, graphics, and memory connections.
ARM’s processor designs include the somewhat older ARM9 and ARM11 designs, and the more recent Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9, which we are beginning to see in very fast chips, and even in chips with multiple cores. The company is pushing the Cortex-A9 for high-end smartphones, and Cortex-A5 for sub-$100 smartphones.
In the graphics arena, ARM offers a design known as Mali. At the show, ARM announced a deal with Global Foundries under which the new foundry has access to ARM’s designs, which it will offer to its customers in making custom chips.
ARM has a strong roadmap for increasing the performance of processors based on its technology in the next few years.
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ARM is far from the only company that offers this kind of intellectual property. Another well-known one is Imagination Technologies, probably best known for its visual IP, notably the PowerVR series for graphics, video, and display. Graphics based on PowerVR are found in Intel’s chipsets for the Atom and other processors with integrated graphics, as well as in a lot of smartphones including the Apple iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre. Imagination also offers communications IP and processor IP, often used for embedded Linux or digital signal processors (DSPs).
ARM and other companies license these designs to processor makers, who then adapt and combine them, often with their own IP; and in most cases, then send them to a semiconductor foundry form manufacturing.
