Do you love your smartphone? Is your tablet the best computer you've ever owned? If you're like me, and nearly a billion other folks on the plant, the answer is a passionate YES! The evidence is everywhere: industry forecasts, customer showrooms, and your own most recent techno-philosophy hallway debate.
Given that emotion, you may be surprised to hear that everything you love about your smart device is going to get better - much better. In fact, you'll soon have the power of a server in your hand.
The unexpected reason for this lies not in semiconductor technology, but in the adoption of 3 arcane chip interfaces. These interfaces are the keys to a new mobile device architecture with PC-like speed and mobile-friendly battery life. The interfaces are:
Speed starts with the processor. Next-generation applications processors will all have multiple cores. More cores means more performance, and with ARM's approach, more performance AND lower power. But more cores also means added hardware complexity to maintain cache coherency. That's where the ACE protocol comes in. ACE defines the interconnect requirements for an ARM-based, multi-core, cache-coherent design. It's a sophisticated protocol and there are serious challenges to pulling it off (read more about the challenges and solutions), but the bottom line is that ACE is a trump card in the mobile SoC game.
Faster processors are important, but only the first step. Speeding up the mobile device also requires moving data faster between chips. That's where M-PCIe and SSIC come in. These interfaces combine the upper layers of the PCI Express and USB protocol stacks with a common, high speed, low power physical interface designed for mobile devices. By maintaining the protocol upper layers, all-important software compatibility is achieved. This enables the vast ecosystems currently supporting PCI Express and USB in mainstream computer design to be leveraged in mobile devices. By using a common, low power physical interface, multi-vendor interoperability is enabled. To learn more, follow these links to read about the migration of PCI Express and USB into mobile devices.
Certainly other technologies will contribute to the mobile device of the future: advanced semiconductor processes, higher speed telecom networks, etc. But a new mobile architecture built upon ACE, M-PCIe, and SSIC is what will put server-grade power in your hand. And you'll love it!
Partner Blogger:Tom Hackett, Product Marketing Director, Cadence, with over 25 years in electronics development, design automation, and IP. Tom works to advance the use of Verification IP to speed the adoption of new interface standards.