The mobile phone market is one of the largest and growing rapidly technological markets. Mobile phones are widely used devices around the globe, and it is quite understandable that nowadays they can process hundreds of operations per second. Microprocessors in mobile phones are primarily responsible for performing calculations at high speed. One can mention ARM Cortex, Nvidia Tegra, and Snapdragon microprocessors as powerful devices for any kind of mobile phones.
In general, microprocessors are designed for external RAM. Microprocessors deal with command and control signaling, they are important in the same way as operating system. Currently the mobile phone processor market is characterized by ARM microcontroller. ARM was formed in 1990, and in 1991 it introduced the ARM6 processor family (Elsevier, 2010). Even though the founder was Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, the number of companies decided to license the design of ARM processors. Since that time their usage was extended to mobile phones. It is worth mentioning that the ARMv5E architecture was embedded to ARMv9E processor family for the purpose of providing digital signal processing instructions for a wide range of multimedia applications. The ARM7 processor is one of the most popular processors used not only in mobile phones. The production constitutes approximately 1 billion processors per year. Another example is the Cortex-M3 processor based on the advantages of the ARM7 processor. The Cortex-M3 included additional capabilities serving the needs of microcontroller applications.
What is more, DSP processors constitute the most widely used type of mobile embedded processors (Koushanfar, 2000). DSP processors generate millions of revenue for manufacturing companies.
References
Elsevier, Inc. (2010). What is the ARM Cortex-M3 Processor. Chapter1.
Koushanfar, F., Prabhu, V., Potkonjak, M., Rabaey, J.M. (2000). Processors for mobile applications. University of …