4.6 2.1.2. solid state era  (Page 8/11)

What is heterogenous processore chips?[“Calling All Phones – From a single-chip mobile communication to smart phones of the future”, Greg Delagi and Baher Haroum, Spring 2012, Vol.4,No.2, pp.21-25]

Historically, Intel and AMD focused on making CPU-based chips (e.g. Core and Athlon) while Nvidia focused on making standalone graphics chips (GPU) for the PC and server markets. All the other players in this landscape have utilized some form of system-on-chip system integration (SoC) to meet the diverse needs of their respective markets. This SOC is heterogenous procesor chip.

Power efficient and Cost efficient custom Digital Signal Processing(DSP) were developed for vocoders and digital communicatrion.

General Purpose DSP processor to support the rapidly evolving modem standards. If computer network uses our analog telephone network them MODEM will be the interface.

DSP increasingly played a bigger role versus analog electronics to realize signal paths initially for MODEMS and later for RF Cellular MODEMS.

Using these technologies, mobile phone, mobile phone size has been reduced and multiple communication functions have been integrated into a single chip. This is called System-on-Chip (SOC). The generic definition of a SoC is the on-chip integration of a variety of functional hardware blocks to suit a specific product application.A SoC can thus be as simple as a basic connectivity chip which combines some mixed-signal and digital circuitry.A more complex SoC may include the on-chip integration of an application processor unit (APU) and a graphics processor unit (GPU).Even more functional SoCs further integrate various other hardware blocks (e.g. image processor, audio/video decoder and modem).It is this ability to continue to integrate disparate functionality on a chip that has enabled SoC technology to rapidly evolve from supporting a simple feature-phone to a smartphone and all the way to a tablet computer.Using low power wireless links and energy efficient computations, multi-media and internet access have been accommodated on a single chip. Multi-medis content is imaging, graphics, video, display and HDI. With exploding consumption of multi-media content, with the advent of 3D Movies and with new content creation capabilities, Smart Phones multi-media related demand on computation is increasing at an unprecedented pace. As size and resolution of the images and video increase exponentially the computational need of the smart phones will correspondingly increase.

Qualcomm started out by designing chips for the growing connectivity market with the advent of cellular telephony and the internet.Qualcomm evolved its product line-up from standalone connectivity chips by adding: an applications processor (Krait via ARM license), a GPU (Adreno via AMD Imageon buyout) and a power management unit.Qualcomm’s flagship products (Snapdragon family) now include all these blocks making it a highly functional mobile SoC product.

Qualcomm (San Diego) has reigned supreme in the market for application specific handset IC like baseband and RF chips since 2007, IHS said. Last year, Qualcomm captured 31 percent of all handset core IC revenue, according to IHS’s wireless competitive landscape report. Qualcomm’s market share was up from 23 percent in 2007, IHS, said.