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Cellular Phones : Introduction And Hardwares Of Cellular/Mobile Phone

1.Introduction to Cellular Phones

Cell phones, also known as mobile phones or wireless phones, are hand-held phones with built-in antennas. Unlike home phones, cell phones can be carried from place to place with a minimum of fuss. This makes them a good choice for people who want to be in touch with other people even when they are away from the house. These days, cell phones provide an incredible array of functions, and new ones are being added at a breakneck pace.

1.1 Hardware

1.1.a Processors in Mobile Phones:

Processor is the brain of the phone and will influence how fast is your smartphone and that fast mean everything from the speed that an application is installed to the speed of your Internet browser.

ARM, a mobile processor architecture that dominates high-end mobile phones and embedded devices like network routers. In its lowest power state, an Atom processor can consume about 100 mW, compared to 1 mW for some ARM chips.

Intel is working on smaller, cooler-running, and more power-efficient versions of Atom that may finally bring x86 (and thus compatibility with desktop OSes and applications) to mobile phones in a few years, but for now, ARM is king on mobile, and all of the processors we'll be looking at below are based on ARM instruction sets.

ARM operates quite differently from Intel. Whereas Intel designs and builds all of its own processors, ARM instead creates instruction sets - any CPU following them will be able to run ARM-compatible code. It also creates reference designs for processors that fit their instruction sets, which allows companies to easily produce their own chipsets around ARM's core designs.

Some companies, like Nvidia, Samsung, and Texas Instruments simply license and adopt the ARM CPU reference design, whereas others, like Qualcomm and Marvell, license only the instruction set and create their own processors to fit them.

ARM's most recent instruction set is version 7, and the first ARMv7 reference design was Cortex A8, whose architecture is found in today's high-end smartphones. Lower-end smartphones today tend to use ARM11 chips, which implement the ARMv6 instruction set.

Dual core processors: Dual-core chips enable more power to be squeezed out of the processor because the chips contain two 1GHz cores - meaning there are two 1GHz processors that can be used in parallel to speed up performance, provided the mobile software has been optimized to take advantage of the parallel processing power. It's not as simple as saying a dual-core processor is twice as fast as a single-core processor, but dual-core chips should enable a noticeable speed and performance hike, particularly when it comes to multitasking.

It will add a bunch of capabilities apart from speeding up your device namely

  • Full HD 1080P video playback and recording
  • Smoother Internet Experience
  • Drive Dual Display
  • Better Graphic Capabilities
  • High Speed Connectivity

Graphic Processor Unit:GPU (videocard) this "part" (it's actually not a part since is embedded in the CPU) set's how fast things are displayed on the screen things like movies games etc. On most modern smartphone platforms (iPhone OS, Android with Windows Mobile as a notable exception), the OS' user interface itself is composite, meaning it is rendered by the GPU. This makes the interface feel a lot smoother than doing UI display calculations on the already resource-constrained CPU.

Some of the mobile phone processors are given below:

1. Snapdragon is a family of mobile system on chips (SoC) by Qualcomm. Qualcomm considers Snapdragon a "platform" for use in smartphones, tablets, and smartbook devices. The Snapdragon application processor core, dubbed Scorpion, is Qualcomm's own design. It has many features similar to those of the ARM Cortex-A8 core and it is based on the ARM v7 instruction set, but theoretically has much higher performance for multimedia-related SIMD operations.

All Snapdragon processors contain the circuitry to decode high-definition video (HD) resolution at 720p or 1080p depending on the Snapdragon chipset. Adreno, the company's proprietary GPU technology, integrated into Snapdragon chipsets (and certain other Qualcomm chipsets) is Qualcomm's own design, using assets the company acquired from AMD

Some of processors are:

Model Number CPU Instruction Set CPU GPU
MSM8655T ARMv7 1.4 GHz Scorpion Adreno 205
MSM8260 ARMv7 1.2-1.5 GHz Dual-core Scorpion Adreno 205

2. Nvidia Tegra is a system-on-a-chip series developed by Nvidia for mobile devices such as smartphones, personal digital assistants, and mobile Internet devices. The Tegra integrates the ARM architecture processor CPU, GPU, northbridge, southbridge, and memory controller onto a single package. The series emphasizes low power consumption and high performance for playing audio and video.

The second generation Tegra system on chip (SoC) has a Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU (lacking ARMs advanced SIMD extension, marketed as NEON), an Ultra Low Power (ULP) GeForce GPU with 4 pixel shaders + 4 vertex shaders and a single-channel memory controller with either LPDDR2 at 600 MHz or DDR2 at 667 MHz. There is also a version of the SoC supporting 3D displays; this SoC uses a higher clocked CPU and GPU.

Some processors are:

Model Number CPU Instruction Set CPU GPU
Tegra 250 T20 ARMv7 1 GHz Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A9 ULP GeForce 333 MHz
Tegra 250 3D T25 ARMv7 1.2 GHz Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A9 ULP GeForce 400 MHz

3. Texas Instruments OMAP (Open Multimedia Application Platform) is a category of proprietary system on chips (SoCs) for portable and mobile multimedia applications developed by Texas Instruments. OMAP devices generally include a general-purpose ARM architecture processor core plus one or more specialized co-processors. Earlier OMAP variants commonly featured a variant of the Texas Instruments TMS320 series digital signal processor.

Some processors are:

Model Number CPU Instruction Set CPU GPU
OMAP4430 ARMv7 1 GHz Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A9 PowerVR SGX540 @ 304 MHz
OMAP4460 ARMv7 1.5 GHz Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A9 PowerVR SGX540 @ 384 MHz

4. Apple Ax is a package on package (PoP) system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed by Apple and manufactured by Samsung. It combines an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU with a PowerVR GPU, and emphasizes power efficiency. The chip commercially debuted with the release of Apple's iPad tablet; followed shortly by the iPhone 4 smartphone, the 4th generation iPod Touch and the 2nd generation Apple TV

Some processors are:

Model Number CPU Instruction Set CPU GPU
A4 ARMv7 800-1000 MHz Single-core ARM Cortex-A8 PowerVR SGX535
A5 ARMv7 1 GHz Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 PowerVR SGX543MP2

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