Lower-cost Smartphone

Smartphone dilemma - brains, brawn, and the bill of materials

Smartphones represent the fastest growing segment of the mobile market. Based on rich application OSes such as Android, Linux, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, these devices are attractive to all participants in the mobile ecosystem for complementary reasons:

  • Smartphones delight end users with features and functionality, especially for connectivity and multimedia, previously found only on the desktop
  • Software vendors (ISVs) find new markets in smartphones and accompanying open software platforms
  • Higher data traffic and sales of applications give new opportunities to mobile network operators (MNOs) and bolster the average revenue per user (ARPU) above and beyond voice alone
  • Device OEMs deliver smartphones at higher price points and enjoy robust margins through channel
  • Semiconductor suppliers, despite lower volumes overall, deliver higher-end CPUs and SoCs into smartphone sockets at higher margins

Unfortunately, the nexus of features, functionality and margin found in smartphones does not translate to the remaining 80-90% of the mainstream mobile marketplace. Featurephones and entry-level handsets, with more modest BOM and price points, simply cannot also deliver the same functionality and user experience.

BOM Lite - same great taste in a single-core phone

Many features and functions separate smartphones from mass-market devices. In cost down mode, handset OEMs and their MNO customers go back to the BOM, in particular to the SoCs and chipsets that support smartphone functionality. One of the major contributors to the cost of high-end handsets lies in the separate dedicated CPUs for application, baseband and multimedia processing. To realize the market opportunity for a mobile phone with the rich application support found in smartphones but at a featurephone price, the first step is to consolidate application and baseband processing on a single ARM processor rather than dedicating a separate processor to each function.

Single-core juggling act

Such consolidation sounds easy but entails providing software-based isolation equivalent to what was provided by the use of two separate processors and the juggling of processor time to run throughput-intensive applications and real-time tasks like baseband and CODEC processing. It can involve integration of diverse open source and proprietary IP and a heady mix of legacy, COTS and new system and application code. Finally, testing and tuning can take additional months, all in a marketplace with increasingly compressed product life cycles.

OKL4 for single-core

OKL4 enables the elusive single-core phone. OKL4 supports hosting the mobile application OS environment (Android, Linux, Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc.) alongside the wireless communication stack or RTOS environment on a single ARM processor. OKL4 helps mobile OEMs deliver rich application support by partitioning a single ARM core into two (or more) secure cells (virtual machines) - one to host a rich mobile application OS and other(s) to run communication stacks and other legacy software applications.
OKL4 is the key to silicon consolidation and to enabling reuse of existing software. OKL4 mobile virtualization eases the combination of a rich application OS with RTOSes and other purposed system software on the same processor, allowing creation and deployment of a high-functioning mid-tier phone in less time and with lower development and deployment costs.

Lower-cost Phone

Lower-cost Phone

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