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International Journal of Engineering Research and Applications (IJERA) is an open access online peer reviewed international journal that publishes research and review articles in the fields of Computer Science, Neural Networks, Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Plastic Engineering, Food Technology, Textile Engineering, Nano Technology & science, Power Electronics, Electronics & Communication Engineering, Computational mathematics, Image processing, Civil Engineering, Structural Engineering, Environmental Engineering, VLSI Testing & Low Power VLSI Design etc.
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![Lokesh Pawar et al Int. Journal of Engineering Research and Applications www.ijera.com
ISSN : 2248-9622, Vol. 4, Issue 5( Version 6), May 2014, pp.81-83
www.ijera.com 81 | P a g e
Smartphone’s Hardware Architectures and Their Issues
Rohit Kumar, Lokesh Pawar,Anurag Aggarwal
Assistant. Professor, Chandigarh University, Gharuan, (Mohali)
Assistant Professor, Chandigarh University, Gharuan, (Mohali)
Assistant Professor, Chandigarh University, Gharuan, (Mohali)
Abstract
Smart phones provides us the capability of a typical computer with absolute mobility and small form factor. But
the hardware architecture of smart phone is significantly different from the conventional hardware architectures.
The feature and architecture of the processors is totally different the traditional processor as these processors are
developed to cope-up with fewer energy availability with smart phones or any other ultra portable devices.
Key-Words: Smartphone platform independence, Cross-Platform development for Smart phones.
I. INTRODUCTION
A smartphone is a mobile phone built on a
mobile computing platform, with more advanced
computing ability and connectivity than a feature
phone. The initial smartphone were devices which
mainly combined the functions of a personal digital
assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone or a camera
phone. Today's models also serve to combine the
functions of portable media players, low-end compact
digital cameras, pocket video cameras, and global
positioning system (GPS) navigation units [1] [2].
Modern smartphone typically also include high-
resolution touch screens, web browsers that can access
and properly display standard web pages rather than
just mobile-optimized web sites, and high-speed data
access via Wi-Fi and mobile broadband.
Hardware architecture of smart phone or any feature
phone differs significantly from the conventional
processor architecture like x86 and x64. Multiple
computational units which are most obvious part of
conventional CPU can’t fit in energy starved
smartphone. So, lots or changes are required to be
done in conventional CPU design and architecture to
make them suitable for smartphone or any other ultra
portable devices.
II. Smartphone and their OS’s
The Smartphone comes with an integral
component called Operating system. The most
common mobile operating systems (OS) used by
modern smartphone include Apple's iOS, Google's
Android, Microsoft's Windows Phone, Nokia's
Symbian, RIM's BlackBerry OS and embedded Linux
distributions such as Maemo and MeeGo. Such
operating systems can be installed on many different
phone models, and typically each device can receive
multiple operating software updates over its lifetime.
III. The Problem of Power Consumption
Ever since the development of smartphones,
these devices has incorporated more and more
functions. One of the big problems is that more
features mean more chips and more processing
cycles, which means higher power
consumption. Because batteries do not evolve at the
same speed as the appetite of the manufacturers (and
buyers) for new features, so a tradeoff always exists
between battery and mobile device.
A typical mobile phone comes with LI-Ion
860 mAh battery which offers approximately 3 watts
of energy to perform all its functions until the next
refill. A laptop will last for only 5 minutes with this
much energy, so energy available for use is major
concern. To accurately calculate the total energy
stored by the battery, multiply the voltage in volts
and the amperage in mAh. For example a battery of
850mAh and 3.7V stores a total of 3,219 mill watts,
or 3.219 watts which is very small. A laptop is
charged to work for few hours as compared to mobile
phone which are supposed to work for days. So it’s a
tough battle for the designers to achieve the desired
motto.
On personal computers PC x86 based
processors e.g. core2Duo, Phenom, are used for
computation. They are highly optimized for
performance and comes with very large transistor
count. The L1, L2 caches in these systems are very
fast and have more capacities for storage, in addition
to this they have dedicated units for decoding
instruction, scheduling, branch-prediction circuits
and multiple execution units per core. To get an idea,
a Core 2 Duo E8200 Penryn-based core (which is a
relatively small chip by today's standards) has no less
than 410 million transistors and has a typical
consumption of 65 watts.
Maker of smartphones are interested in
using such capabilities but the heating constraints
and power consumption constraints would not let
them go e.g. to run a Core 2 Duo processor will
RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS](https://cdn.statically.io/img/image.slidesharecdn.com/o045068183-140716024609-phpapp01/85/O045068183-1-320.jpg)
![Lokesh Pawar et al Int. Journal of Engineering Research and Applications www.ijera.com
ISSN : 2248-9622, Vol. 4, Issue 5( Version 6), May 2014, pp.81-83
www.ijera.com 82 | P a g e
require 80 mm copper heat sink and a 6-cell battery
which is impossible to achieve with present
technology.
That is why no smartphone has been made
based on x86 processors architecture. Even low-
power processors like the Atom, have an electrical
load that is too high for a smartphone and the phone
battery would last only for 5 to 10 minutes. The
restrictions regarding the size and consumption has
made the hardware of smartphones evolve in a way
quite different from the PC, using low-power
processors and highly integrated chips.
Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set
Computer) machines are being used to mitigate the
above mentioned problem of x86 processors. ARM
(Advanced RISC Machines) are 32-bit RISC
processors, with highly optimized architecture and
low numbers of transistors and have very low power
consumption.
ARM processors are produced in larger
volumes and brutally used in all sorts of devices,
routers and Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line
(ADSL) modems to video games. Virtually every
electronic device you have at home uses a 32 bit
ARM processor including smartphones and only
exception is your PC.
Another secret is the integration of
components and the use of dedicated controllers for
different functions, different from what one have on
a PC, where almost everything is done by the main
processor. The advantage of using dedicated
controllers is that they perform their functions
directly in hardware, instead of software
implementation and have very fast execution. Thus,
they can perform their tasks with fewer transistors
and less processing cycles, which translates into
lower power consumption. Any smartphone now has
several of these controllers, which are off most of the
time and are awake only when they have some work
to do.
IV. Use of ARM in Smartphones
as from the just concluded discussion ARM
is the architecture that must be used for smartphone
or any other feature phone. ARM derives it’s roots
form RISC computer architecture which offers a very
simple architecture and has only few memory access
instructions. Figure 1.1 shows a basic ARM
processor architecture. It can be
Figure 1.1 : ARM Processor Architecture.
concluded from that diagram that this
archicture requires very less circuitry as compared to
x86 based processor architecture.
V. Conclusions
Problem of power consumption and energy
conservation plays a vital role in ultra portable
mobile devices. The size of the smartphone or size of
any other ultra portable device also plays a major
role in its computational and energy efficiency
requirements. More the size more the power backup
one can house in the smartphone. But the size is very
limiting factor as we can’t increase the size by large
extent and if we will do so we will lose the ultra
portability in proportion with the size. So the main
focus is the power consumption by the processor and
we should limit it to the extent we can. The
conventional architecture cant work with few energy
so specialized hardware’s (processors) must be
developed to cope up with limited energy
availability. ARM is the one architecture which
offers lots of options to cope up with the fewer
energy availability.
References
[1] Mombert, G., http://www.digitaltrends.com/
mobile/what-is-asmartphone/ [online], last
seen dec, 2010.
[2]. Johnny John and Chris Riddle, “Smartphone
Power”, proceedings of DAC, Anaheim,
California, USA, pp. 935-936, 2010.
[3]. Vinay Mehta, http://berylsystems.com/
smartphone.pdf [online], seen oct, 2010.
[4]. Steven Cavanagh and Yingxu Wang,
“Design of a Real-Time Virtual Machine
(RTVM)”, proceedings of Electrical and
Computer Engineering 2005 Canadian
Conference, pp. 2021-2024, May, 2005.
[5]. Omar A. Fres and Ignacio G. Alonso,
“Rovim: A Generic and Extensible Virtual
Machine for Mobile Robots”, Fifth
International Conference on Systems held in
USA, pp. 37-40, 2010.
[6]. Michael Bedford Taylor, “The Raw
Microprocessor: A Computational Fabric
for Software Circuits and General-Purpose](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.slideshare.net/data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
O045068183
- 1. Lokesh Pawar et al Int. Journal of Engineering Research and Applications www.ijera.com ISSN : 2248-9622, Vol. 4, Issue 5( Version 6), May 2014, pp.81-83 www.ijera.com 81 | P a g e Smartphone’s Hardware Architectures and Their Issues Rohit Kumar, Lokesh Pawar,Anurag Aggarwal Assistant. Professor, Chandigarh University, Gharuan, (Mohali) Assistant Professor, Chandigarh University, Gharuan, (Mohali) Assistant Professor, Chandigarh University, Gharuan, (Mohali) Abstract Smart phones provides us the capability of a typical computer with absolute mobility and small form factor. But the hardware architecture of smart phone is significantly different from the conventional hardware architectures. The feature and architecture of the processors is totally different the traditional processor as these processors are developed to cope-up with fewer energy availability with smart phones or any other ultra portable devices. Key-Words: Smartphone platform independence, Cross-Platform development for Smart phones. I. INTRODUCTION A smartphone is a mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a feature phone. The initial smartphone were devices which mainly combined the functions of a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone or a camera phone. Today's models also serve to combine the functions of portable media players, low-end compact digital cameras, pocket video cameras, and global positioning system (GPS) navigation units [1] [2]. Modern smartphone typically also include high- resolution touch screens, web browsers that can access and properly display standard web pages rather than just mobile-optimized web sites, and high-speed data access via Wi-Fi and mobile broadband. Hardware architecture of smart phone or any feature phone differs significantly from the conventional processor architecture like x86 and x64. Multiple computational units which are most obvious part of conventional CPU can’t fit in energy starved smartphone. So, lots or changes are required to be done in conventional CPU design and architecture to make them suitable for smartphone or any other ultra portable devices. II. Smartphone and their OS’s The Smartphone comes with an integral component called Operating system. The most common mobile operating systems (OS) used by modern smartphone include Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Phone, Nokia's Symbian, RIM's BlackBerry OS and embedded Linux distributions such as Maemo and MeeGo. Such operating systems can be installed on many different phone models, and typically each device can receive multiple operating software updates over its lifetime. III. The Problem of Power Consumption Ever since the development of smartphones, these devices has incorporated more and more functions. One of the big problems is that more features mean more chips and more processing cycles, which means higher power consumption. Because batteries do not evolve at the same speed as the appetite of the manufacturers (and buyers) for new features, so a tradeoff always exists between battery and mobile device. A typical mobile phone comes with LI-Ion 860 mAh battery which offers approximately 3 watts of energy to perform all its functions until the next refill. A laptop will last for only 5 minutes with this much energy, so energy available for use is major concern. To accurately calculate the total energy stored by the battery, multiply the voltage in volts and the amperage in mAh. For example a battery of 850mAh and 3.7V stores a total of 3,219 mill watts, or 3.219 watts which is very small. A laptop is charged to work for few hours as compared to mobile phone which are supposed to work for days. So it’s a tough battle for the designers to achieve the desired motto. On personal computers PC x86 based processors e.g. core2Duo, Phenom, are used for computation. They are highly optimized for performance and comes with very large transistor count. The L1, L2 caches in these systems are very fast and have more capacities for storage, in addition to this they have dedicated units for decoding instruction, scheduling, branch-prediction circuits and multiple execution units per core. To get an idea, a Core 2 Duo E8200 Penryn-based core (which is a relatively small chip by today's standards) has no less than 410 million transistors and has a typical consumption of 65 watts. Maker of smartphones are interested in using such capabilities but the heating constraints and power consumption constraints would not let them go e.g. to run a Core 2 Duo processor will RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS
- 2. Lokesh Pawar et al Int. Journal of Engineering Research and Applications www.ijera.com ISSN : 2248-9622, Vol. 4, Issue 5( Version 6), May 2014, pp.81-83 www.ijera.com 82 | P a g e require 80 mm copper heat sink and a 6-cell battery which is impossible to achieve with present technology. That is why no smartphone has been made based on x86 processors architecture. Even low- power processors like the Atom, have an electrical load that is too high for a smartphone and the phone battery would last only for 5 to 10 minutes. The restrictions regarding the size and consumption has made the hardware of smartphones evolve in a way quite different from the PC, using low-power processors and highly integrated chips. Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) machines are being used to mitigate the above mentioned problem of x86 processors. ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) are 32-bit RISC processors, with highly optimized architecture and low numbers of transistors and have very low power consumption. ARM processors are produced in larger volumes and brutally used in all sorts of devices, routers and Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) modems to video games. Virtually every electronic device you have at home uses a 32 bit ARM processor including smartphones and only exception is your PC. Another secret is the integration of components and the use of dedicated controllers for different functions, different from what one have on a PC, where almost everything is done by the main processor. The advantage of using dedicated controllers is that they perform their functions directly in hardware, instead of software implementation and have very fast execution. Thus, they can perform their tasks with fewer transistors and less processing cycles, which translates into lower power consumption. Any smartphone now has several of these controllers, which are off most of the time and are awake only when they have some work to do. IV. Use of ARM in Smartphones as from the just concluded discussion ARM is the architecture that must be used for smartphone or any other feature phone. ARM derives it’s roots form RISC computer architecture which offers a very simple architecture and has only few memory access instructions. Figure 1.1 shows a basic ARM processor architecture. It can be Figure 1.1 : ARM Processor Architecture. concluded from that diagram that this archicture requires very less circuitry as compared to x86 based processor architecture. V. Conclusions Problem of power consumption and energy conservation plays a vital role in ultra portable mobile devices. The size of the smartphone or size of any other ultra portable device also plays a major role in its computational and energy efficiency requirements. More the size more the power backup one can house in the smartphone. But the size is very limiting factor as we can’t increase the size by large extent and if we will do so we will lose the ultra portability in proportion with the size. So the main focus is the power consumption by the processor and we should limit it to the extent we can. The conventional architecture cant work with few energy so specialized hardware’s (processors) must be developed to cope up with limited energy availability. ARM is the one architecture which offers lots of options to cope up with the fewer energy availability. References [1] Mombert, G., http://www.digitaltrends.com/ mobile/what-is-asmartphone/ [online], last seen dec, 2010. [2]. Johnny John and Chris Riddle, “Smartphone Power”, proceedings of DAC, Anaheim, California, USA, pp. 935-936, 2010. [3]. Vinay Mehta, http://berylsystems.com/ smartphone.pdf [online], seen oct, 2010. [4]. Steven Cavanagh and Yingxu Wang, “Design of a Real-Time Virtual Machine (RTVM)”, proceedings of Electrical and Computer Engineering 2005 Canadian Conference, pp. 2021-2024, May, 2005. [5]. Omar A. Fres and Ignacio G. Alonso, “Rovim: A Generic and Extensible Virtual Machine for Mobile Robots”, Fifth International Conference on Systems held in USA, pp. 37-40, 2010. [6]. Michael Bedford Taylor, “The Raw Microprocessor: A Computational Fabric for Software Circuits and General-Purpose
- 3. Lokesh Pawar et al Int. Journal of Engineering Research and Applications www.ijera.com ISSN : 2248-9622, Vol. 4, Issue 5( Version 6), May 2014, pp.81-83 www.ijera.com 83 | P a g e Programs”, IEEE proceedings, pp. 24-35, 2002. [7]. Robert H. Dennard, “Design of lon- Implanted MOSFET's with Very Small Physical Dimensions”, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. SC-9, pp. 256-268, October 1974. [8]. Asaf Ashkenazia, Dimitry Akselrodb and Yossi Amona, “Platform Independent Overall Security Architecture in Multi- Processor System-on-Chip ICs for Use in Mobile Phones and Handheld Devices”, proceedings of World Automation Congress (WAC), vol.33, issue no.5-6, pp. 407-424, 2007. [9]. Meira Levy, Peretz Shoval, Bracha Shapira, Aviram Dayan and Meytal Tubi, “Task Modeling Infrastructure for Analyzing Smartphone Usage” Ninth International Conference on Mobile Business / 2010 Ninth Global Mobility Roundtable, pp.264- 271, 2010.