Since 2.5G, mobile phones have gradually evolved into a multifunctional platform of video, data, entertainment, commerce, and payment functions, instead of providing voice service only.
In the 3G era, the network upgrade has proved to be a stimulus to mobile phones multimedia applications. The baseband processor has failed to satisfy the increasing needs of multimedia applications. This new trend calls for the creation of multimedia application processors.
In fact, creating a multimedia application processor is much easier than creating a baseband processor. For baseband processors, many factors must be considered: years of experience in operating communication protocol stack, power consumption, cost and volume. And considering the high patent fees and the high cost of R&D, the medium and small enterprises can hardly afford to create baseband processors. Now, the basic knowledge for multimedia application processor is video decoding and 3D acceleration technology, and quite a number of enterprises have this knowledge. Plus, as the R & D expenditure is quite low, and as the mobile phone market scale exceeds 700 million handsets, multimedia application processors have really bright prospects.
The figure above is the global market scale of multimedia application processor, which is expected to be up to USD 2.8 billion by 2008.
The additional applications of future mobile phones will not be limited to multimedia, but will also consist of Wi-Fi, UWB, A-GPS, bluetooth, ultrared, 3D game, E-payment, and security applications. The emergence of such applications also calls for application processors. In the early stages, application processors usually allowed camera control or back-end signal processing. Later on, with the emergence of music, film shooting and TV applications, the application processor became multifunctional and many low-end applications were integrated into the baseband processor.
Application processor demand includes the following:
1、Performance, including multimedia processing and multi-task implementing performance
2、Cost, including chip cost, EMS memory cost and consumption
3、Power consumption, including standby and operation
4、Enlargement, performance dynamic allowance, developing-style operating system and JAVA support
5、Application development, compatibility between hardware and software, the third party support, design tools and support, services.
Application processors can be divided into 3 groups in term of designing, one is array processor with single ARM kernel, another is ARM kernel plus DSP, and the last one is gate-level logic circuit design. In addition, a few manufacturers apply a RISC structure.
The greatest merit of ARM kernel is its easy-to-build operation platform and good performance, while its demerit is the performance / power consumption ratio, which is inferior to DSP's. Consequently, ARM kernel is good at interlinking with softwares, and its high flexibility allows it to control multi-devices mobile phones. Meanwhile, DSP is good at fixed model calculating. The performance of ARM has much to do with the operation frequency: to reach high performances, clock frequency must be increased, which in turn leads to an increased power consumption. The DSP kernel of TMS320C55x, which is used in Texas multimedia processor, has a much higher efficiency than that of ARM11.
High Bit Rate DSP takes a long period of development and needs a lot of manpower and capital. Medium or small-sized enterprises don't usually develop HI-BIT DSP alone, but the array processor with ARM kernel is widely used. Display card makers have gathered plenty of experiences in graphic processing and are able to design multimedia application processors based on gate-level logic circuits.
Price list of common application processors
Total 69 models of mobile phones adapted application processor were listed in the report, as follows:
Motorola is the company launching the most models and at the fastest pace, and as many as 30 types processors were adopted. Nokia is designing the model that adopt ST Nomadik. Japanese manufacturers such as Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic, Sanyo, Sharp, Kyocera and Hitachi tend to adopt the SH-MOBILE supplied by Renesas; Samsung attempts to try different application processors, LG chooses CoreLogic; SonyEricsson chooses Nexperia chip supplied by Philips for its smartphone - P800/P900/P910, and it tends to choose the application processor of PNX4008 also supplied by Philips. Siemens mobile phone division, after being acquired by Benq, is likely to choose the application processors supplied by Mediatek.
In the Chinese mobile phone market, domestic vendors pay more attention to cost savings than domestic brands. Therefore, Mediatek has gained a great market share. Even though Texas, Philips, Freescale are the main suppliers of foreign brands, obviously, in China market, Mediatek is the biggest competitor - a powerful and sophisticated rival who is supported by UMC.
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