ESL Methods for Optimizing a Multi-media Phone Chip

By Danilo Piergentili, David Coupe, NXP Semiconductors
May 27, 2008 -- edadesignline.com
  
Our team is chartered to validate and optimize the architecture of our NXP mobile phone chips. This is a very challenging application domain, as an ever increasing set of multi-media and wireless communication functions need to be integrated into one SoC. Next to a growing number of communication standards, today's mobile phones support a large variety of multi-media applications like MP3 audio, video recording and playback, and digital still camera.

The trend towards high-quality multimedia content and higher communication bandwidth drastically increases the complexity of the underlying SoC architecture. In previous designs a single application processor was sufficient to run the rather simple phone software and to control the modem subsystem. Today numerous dedicated IP blocks are necessary to perform the multimedia functions with the required performance and energy efficiency.

1. Block diagram of a multi-media mobile phone.

The high-level block-diagram of the multi-media subsystem of a mobile phone is depicted in Figure 1. The four components on the top are initiators on the bus, whereas the multi-port memory controller is a target.

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