Mobile Chip Components Innovation

Mobile Chip Components Innovation

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Wikipedia

The features of mobile phones are the set of capabilities, services and applications that they offer to their users. Mobile phones are often referred to as feature phones, and offer basic telephony. Handsets with more advanced computing ability through the use of native code try to differentiate their own products by implementing additional functions to make them more attractive to consumers. This has led to great innovation in mobile phone development over the past 20 years.

The common components found on all phones are:

• A number of metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit (IC) chips.
• A battery (typically a lithium-ion battery), providing the power source for the phone functions.
• An input mechanism to allow the user to interact with the phone. The most common input mechanism is a keypad, but touch screens are also found in smartphones.
• Basic mobile phone services to allow users to make calls and send text messages.
• All GSM phones use a SIM card to allow an account to be swapped among devices. Some CDMA devices also have a similar card called a R-UIM.
• Individual GSM, WCDMA, IDEN and some satellite phone devices are uniquely identified by an International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number.

All mobile phones are designed to work on cellular networks and contain a standard set of services that allow phones of different types and in different countries to communicate with each other. However, they can also support other features added by various manufacturers over the years:

A typical smartphone contains a number of metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit (IC) chips, which in turn contain billions of tiny MOS field-effect transistors (MOSFETs). A typical smartphone contains the following MOS IC chips.

• Application processor (CMOS system-on-a-chip)
• Flash memory (floating-gate MOS memory)
• Cellular modem (baseband RF CMOS)
• RF transceiver (RF CMOS)
• Phone camera image sensor (CMOS image sensor)
• Power management integrated circuit (power MOSFETs)
• Display driver (LCD or LED driver)
• Wireless communication chips (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS receiver)
• Sound chip (audio codec and power amplifier)
• Gyroscope
• Capacitive touch screen controller (ASIC and DSP)
• RF power amplifier (LDMOS)

Besides the number keypad and buttons for accepting and declining calls (typically from left to right and coloured green and red respectively), button mobile phones commonly feature two option keys, one to the left and one to the right, and a four-directional D-pad which may feature a center button which acts in resemblance to an “Enter” and “OK” button.

A pushable scroll wheel has been implemented in the 1990s on the Nokia 7110.

In early stages, every mobile phone company had its own user interface, which can be considered as “closed” operating system, since there was a minimal configurability. A limited variety of basic applications (usually games, accessories like calculator or conversion tool and so on) was usually included with the phone and those were not available otherwise. Early mobile phones included basic web browser, for reading basic WAP pages. Handhelds (Personal digital assistants like Palm, running Palm OS) were more sophisticated and also included more advanced browser and a touch screen (for use with stylus), but these were not broadly used, comparing to standard phones. Other capabilities like Pulling and Pushing Emails or working with calendar were also made more accessible but it usually required physical (and not wireless) Syncing. BlackBerry 850, an email pager, released January 19, 1999, was the first device to integrate Email.

A major step towards a more “open” mobile OS was the symbian S60 OS, that could be expanded by downloading software (written in C++, java or python), and its appearance was more configurable. In July 2008, Apple introduced its App store, which made downloading mobile applications more accessible. In October 2008, the HTC Dream was the first commercially released device to use the Linux-based Android OS, which was purchased and further developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance to create an open competitor to other major smartphone platforms of the time (Mainly Symbian operating system, BlackBerry OS, and iOS)-The operating system offered a customizable graphical user interface and a notification system showing a list of recent messages pushed from apps.

The most commonly used data application on mobile phones is SMS text messaging. The first SMS text message was sent from a computer to a mobile phone in 1992 in the UK, while the first person-to-person SMS from phone to phone was sent in Finland in 1993.

The first mobile news service, delivered via SMS, was launched in Finland in 2000. Mobile news services are expanding with many organizations providing “on-demand” news services by SMS. Some also provide “instant” news pushed out by SMS.

Mobile payments were first trialled in Finland in 1998 when two Coca-Cola vending machines in Espoo were enabled to work with SMS payments. Eventually, the idea spread and in 1999 the Philippines launched the first commercial mobile payments systems, on the mobile operators Globe and Smart. Today, mobile payments ranging from mobile banking to mobile credit cards to mobile commerce are very widely used in Asia and Africa, and in selected European markets. Usually, the SMS services utilize short code.

Some network operators have utilized USSD for information, entertainment or finance services (e.g. M-Pesa).

Other non-SMS data services used on mobile phones include mobile music, downloadable logos and pictures, gaming, gambling, adult entertainment and advertising. The first downloadable mobile content was sold to a mobile phone in Finland in 1998, when Radiolinja (now Elisa) introduced the downloadable ringtone service. In 1999, Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo introduced its mobile Internet service, i-Mode, which today is the world’s largest mobile Internet service.

Even after the appearance of smartphones, network operators have continued to offer information services, although in some places, those services have become less common.

In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components in one or more integrated circuits known as a “Data Flow Management System” that manages the data flow between the processor, memory and peripherals. It is usually found on the motherboard. Chipsets are usually designed to work with a specific family of microprocessors. Because it controls communications between the processor and external devices, the chipset plays a crucial role in determining system performance.

 

 

In computing, the term chipset commonly refers to a set of specialized chips on a computer’s motherboard or an expansion card. In personal computers, the first chipset for the IBM PC AT of 1984 was the NEAT chipset developed by Chips and Technologies for the Intel 80286 CPU.

In home computers

, game consoles, and arcade-game hardware of the 1980s and 1990s, the term chipset was used for the custom audio and graphics chips. Examples include the Commodore Amiga’s Original Chip Set or SEGA’s System 16 chipset.

The term chipset often refers to a specific pair of chips on the motherboard: the northbridge and the southbridge. The northbridge links the CPU to very high-speed devices, especially RAM and graphics controllers, and the southbridge connects to lower-speed peripheral buses (such as PCI or ISA). In many modern chipsets, the southbridge contains some on-chip integrated peripherals, such as Ethernet, USB, and audio devices.

Motherboards and their chipsets often come from different manufacturers. As of 2021, manufacturers of chipsets for x86 motherboards include AMD, Intel, VIA Technologies and Zhaoxin.

In the 1990s, a major designer and manufacturer of chipsets was VLSI Technology in Tempe, Arizona. The early Apple Power Macintosh PCs (that used the Motorola 68030 and 68040) had chipsets from VLSI Technology. Some of their innovations included the integration of PCI bridge logic, the GraphiCore 2D graphics accelerator and direct support for synchronous DRAM, the forerunner of DDR SDRAM memory.

In the 1980s, Chips and Technologies pioneered the manufacturing of chipsets for PC-compatible computers. Computer systems produced since then often share commonly used chipsets, even across widely disparate computing specialties. For example, the NCR 53C9x, a low-cost chipset implementing a SCSI interface to storage devices, could be found in Unix machines such as the MIPS Magnum, embedded devices, and personal computers.

Traditionally in x86 computers, the processor’s primary connection to the rest of the machine was through the motherboard chip set’s north bridge. The north bridge was directly responsible for communications with high-speed devices (system memory and primary expansion buses, such as PCIe, AGP, and PCI cards, being common examples) and conversely any system communication back to the processor. This connection between the processor and north bridge is commonly designated the front-side bus (FSB). Requests to resources not directly controlled by the north bridge were offloaded to the south bridge, with the north bridge being an intermediary between the processor and the south bridge. The south bridge handled “everything else”, generally lower-speed peripherals and board functions (the largest being hard disk and storage connectivity) such as USB, parallel and serial communications. In 1990s and early 2000s, the interface between a north bridge and south bridge was the PCI bus.

Before 2003, any interaction between a CPU and main memory or an expansion device such as a graphics card(s) — whether AGP, PCI or integrated into the motherboard — was directly controlled by the north bridge IC on behalf of the processor. This made processor performance highly dependent on the system chip set, especially the north bridge’s memory performance and ability to shuttle this information back to the processor. In 2003, however, AMD’s introduction of the Athlon 64-bit series of processors changed this. The Athlon 64 marked the introduction of an integrated memory controller being incorporated into the processor itself thus allowing the processor to directly access and handle memory, negating the need for a traditional north bridge to do so. Intel followed suit in 2008 with the release of its Core i series CPUs and the X58 platform.

In newer processors integration has further increased, primarily through the inclusion of the system’s primary PCIe controller and integrated graphics directly on the CPU itself. As fewer functions are left un-handled by the processor, chip set vendors have condensed the remaining north bridge and south bridge functions into a single chip. Intel’s version of this is the “Platform Controller Hub” (PCH) while AMD’s version was called Fusion Controller Hub (FCH, this name stopped being used with the release of the Zen architecture), effectively an enhanced south bridge for the remaining peripherals—as traditional north bridge duties, such as memory controller, expansion bus (PCIe) interface and even on-board video controller, are integrated into the CPU die itself (the chipset often contains secondary PCIe connections though). However, the Platform Controller Hub was also integrated into the processor package as a second die for mobile variants of the Skylake processors. The north bridge to south bridge interconnect interfaces used now are DMI (Intel) and UMI (AMD).