Design of multimedia mobile phone based on West Bridge SLIM architecture

Today's hot-selling mobile phones cannot rely solely on appearance, battery life and reliability; their ability to adapt to new usage patterns and their ability to meet industry performance standards is also important. Mobile phones are very fast to integrate with other consumer electronic devices such as PDAs, PMPs, and digital cameras. New phones such as the Sony Ericsson Walkman W950i and the Nokia N series are good examples. In order to get new mobile phones to market in the market, system engineers are trying to add more and more features to the mobile phone system architecture. However, the biggest failure of these multi-party "integrated" mobile phones is often unable to provide a good user experience.

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High integration is the failure of mobile phone failure?

There may be many factors in the failure of highly integrated mobile phones, but most of the most likely reasons are not easy to use, making some mobile phones less attractive to consumers. For some specific products, usability is not only about the ease of operation, but also the performance of each of these functions, especially when comparing products with other functions on the market. The quality of the integrated functionality is often overlooked. Mobile phones with a variety of built-in low-quality digital cameras are the best examples on the market today. System designers must think more deeply about the features, not just thinking about system specifications, but more about the good consumer experience that each integrated feature can bring.

In the consumer electronics market, multimedia phones that support audio-visual playback and digital cameras have quickly changed from so-called high-end products to mid-range products, and some are even low-end mobile phones. While the price of flash memory continues to fall rapidly, multimedia phones will gradually evolve into storage devices that support larger capacities. Mobile phones with high-capacity storage can accommodate higher-speed media content and larger pixel camera modules. In today's market, 1GB of memory capacity can be considered as an "incremental unit" for large storage densities, and multimedia handsets are also expected to support more than 1GB of storage capacity. This trend can be seen in the recently finalized SD2.0 specification, where the standard SD card has a maximum capacity of 32GB. In addition to SD/MMC cards, most common large-capacity storage devices are built-in NAND or hard disk drives.

The most important thing for multimedia phones is the ability to support fast external connections to transfer large amounts of media content such as music, movies and photos. The most common way to connect is to use USB to connect to a PC. Although most mobile phones on the market today only support USB 1.1 (full-speed USB mode at 12Mbps per second), the need for faster USB 2.0 connectivity (high-speed USB mode at 480Mbps per second) is also fast. Increased. Table 1 lists an overview of the two specifications, as well as some examples of transmission times, which are calculated at the original USB signal rate (ignoring the software burden). In Figure 1, it is a general mobile phone architecture that includes the current baseband processor. Please note that it only has SIE integrated with FSUSB (Full Speed ​​USB), so you need to add a set of full-speed USB transceivers.

Table 1 shows the original signal transmission rate of full-speed and high-speed USB, and as the data shows, high-speed USB is 40 times faster than full-speed USB. However, these data do not take into account any software burden and hardware limitations, so the actual sustained and effective transmission rate in the actual system will be much lower.

The bottleneck of high-speed USB built by mobile phones

At first glance, one might think that if high-speed USB is used, the bandwidth will automatically increase, so that the problem of slow transmission rate between the large-capacity storage device and the computer can be effectively solved. However, the problem is not as easy as it seems. Because the system architecture determines the burden and limitations of hardware and software, the actual effective data transfer rate is closely related to the system architecture in the USB connection. Figure 2 below shows an example of the construction of Hi-Speed ​​USB.

Since the baseband processor only supports full-speed USB mode, a high-speed USB controller is required to support the Hi-Speed ​​USB mode. Usually the high-speed USB controller is connected to the processor's external memory interface and shares the memory interface with other memory devices such as NAND and SDRAM. In this architecture, the red arrow of Figure 2 simply represents the flow of data from a computer to a mass storage device via a high speed USB. Compared to Figure 2, Figure 3 is a more practical version.

In Figure 3, the data flow is not as straightforward as the one in Figure 2. The data from the computer first passes through the high-speed USB pipe and is temporarily stored in the SDRAM buffer of the baseband processor. The processor then reads the data in the buffer and writes it to a large number of storage devices—the NAND flash devices in the figure. This series of intermediate transmissions not only does not allow the system to fully utilize Hi-Speed ​​USB functionality, but may also significantly reduce overall system performance because the software has not been carefully optimized. In some designs, an overly simplistic software architecture design can seriously jeopardize overall system performance. Therefore, using this architecture often fails to achieve the best user experience that the high-speed USB was originally designed to provide.

In addition, the more features that are integrated, the inevitable need for application multitasking. One of the challenges that the mobile phone architecture needs to overcome is to be able to flexibly design the architecture to accommodate new usage patterns. For example, with the evolution of 3G+ wireless technology, the bandwidth of wireless interfaces has also increased exponentially, allowing users to use 3G+ mobile phones as modems for notebook computers, providing high-speed Internet connectivity. This is especially useful for end users, allowing them to quickly access the Internet anytime, anywhere.

However, this new usage model is only useful if it supports multitasking effectively. For example, when a user uses a mobile phone as a mass storage device such as a flash drive, or is downloading media content, it must maintain the original function of answering/calling and surfing the Internet, otherwise it will be quite inconvenient to use. In the mobile phone architecture of Figure 3, when the USB is transmitting data, the baseband processor is busy moving data, and there is not much spare power to effectively handle core tasks such as making calls. As a result, handset designers are now faced with the challenge of improving existing handset architectures to meet the needs of next-generation usage models.
West Bridge concept like PC North and South Bridge

Cypress published the revolutionary West Bridge concept in December 2006. Just like the South Bridge and North Bridge in the PC world, the West Bridge series is designed to connect the main processor of the embedded system to the external perimeter. The first component to be launched was West Bridge Antioch's high-capacity storage peripheral controller for the mobile phone market. Because this component is designed for mobile applications, it is not only small in size but also low in power consumption. The architecture block of West Bridge Antioch is shown in Figure 4.

West Bridge Antioch consists of three ports: a processor port 埠 "P", a high-speed USB port 埠 "U", and a mass storage device connection port "S". The "P" port provides connectivity to the embedded processor and supports hardware DMA access. In mobile phone design, the “P” is generally connected to the standard external memory interface of the baseband processor. The “U” port provides USB 2.0 high-speed USB connectivity, while the “S” port supports a variety of high-capacity storage devices. In Antioch, the "S" port supports 8-bit/16-bit NAND, SD/miniSD/microSD/T-Flash, MMC/MMC+, and the new hard disk standard CE-ATA. Antioch also supports an 8-bit NAND and an SD/MMC/CE-ATA device, or a single 16-bit NAND.

The red arrow in Figure 4 indicates the possible data paths among the three ports, the technology used is West Bridge Antioch's innovative Simultaneous Link to Independent Multi-Media (SLIMTM) architecture. The arrow "1", which is the path between the "P" and "U" ports, is the path that the baseband processor connects to the outside world through the high-speed USB. This data path can be used for new usage modes such as the previously mentioned wireless modem. The arrow "2", which is the path between the "P" and "S" ports, allows the baseband processor to directly access the mass storage device as if a large number of storage devices were directly connected to the processor. The arrow "3", which is the path between the "U" and "S" ports, allows data to be uploaded or downloaded between the PC and the mass storage device on the handset. This data path is generally used to transfer media files, such as downloading MP3/WMA/Video from a PC to a mobile phone, or transferring photos from a mobile phone to a PC. Compared to the mobile phone architecture in Figure 3, the mass storage device here is connected to West Bridge Antioch instead of the baseband processor. Because the processor is no longer on the path between the PC and the mass storage device, the baseband processor can be completely unaware of the data transfer operation. As a result, the baseband processor has more bandwidth resources to handle more important tasks. Figure 5 shows a new architecture for this. It should be noted that the path between the PC and the mass storage device is different from the path in Figures 2 and 3.

Ultimately, the transmission rate of the direct path from the PC to the mass storage device can be effectively increased significantly. Cypress also measured the effective USB transfer rate of several different mobile devices on the market. Measurements were done in a controlled environment and the results are shown in Table 2. These device names are based on confidentiality and are not disclosed.

As can be seen in Table 2 below, the direct path greatly increases the effective transmission rate between the PC and the mass storage device. For systems that are performance-oriented, this is why West Bridge Antioch is so popular.

Advantages of the SLIMTM architecture

More importantly, the SLIMTM architecture allows these three paths to be enabled at the same time, which means that when using West Bridge Antioch as a mass storage peripheral controller, the handset design can be multi-tasking. In general, the processor takes about two years from design to mass production, which means that the processor often cannot support the latest mass storage devices on the market, because the storage standard changes much faster than the processor design cycle. When most of the processors on the market cannot support some of the industry's latest mass storage devices, West Bridge's device family can be used as a perfect bridge between the two. For example, Antioch is compatible with the SD2.0 specification and supports SD cards with a maximum capacity of 32GB and CE-ATA small hard drives designed for the consumer market.

With West Bridge Antioch, cell phone design engineers no longer need to be limited by the trade-off between performance and resiliency. The new SLIMTM architecture not only provides the best high-speed USB experience from the direct path between the mass storage device and the PC, but also provides multi-tasking capabilities that support multiple usage modes simultaneously and maintain consistent and effective Transmission rate. In short, West Bridge Antioch is the ideal connectivity solution for mass storage peripherals, whether in today's or tomorrow's multimedia handset designs.

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