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This drive for integration is placing significant demands on the mobile phone architecture. And as the phone manages increasingly complex functions (like multimedia content) both battery limitations and electro-magnetic interference have a significant bearing on the functioning of a handset.

To counter these challenges, vendors seem to have found a solution in the form of reprogrammability of the baseband core.

The mobile phone's most critical functions are the inter-conversion of voice, data and video signals between analog and digital formats. These functions are handled by the baseband unit of the device. Traditional microprocessors are not suitable for these resource intensive tasks. Therefore, manufacturers deploy ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) or DSP (Digital Signal Processor) architectures for the baseband unit. While ASICs are known to be power and cost efficient, they score low on the count of programmability. The converse is true for DSPs. It is important to remember that each wireless technology has different algorithmic, computational and architectural requirements when it comes to the design of their baseband units. Every new addition to the protocols supported throws new challenges to the baseband regarding computational efficiency and the economy of power consumption. Additionally, within the protocol, the higher the bandwidth supported, the higher the load on the baseband unit.

The challenge becomes more potent with industry players opting for different combinations of the various wireless technologies, and therefore OEMs can never be certain about the allowances that have to be made in implementation of the baseband.

Reprogramming the baseband is proving to be an effective way of addressing this growing challenge. Software Defined Radio (SDR) is a collection of technologies that espouse the re-configurability for wireless infrastructure. SDR allows the same hardware to be tailored to perform diverse functions at different points in time and saves the platform developers from design and development overheads of different hardware platforms. It is pertinent to note that the pressure of supporting multiple wireless protocols is incumbent not just on the mobile phone, but on the network elements as well. While most DSP vendors have reprogrammability on their development agendas, some of the early starters are Analog Devices, Lyrtech, Ericsson and Mitsubishi Electric. These vendors have reprogrammable hardware products like base stations and other network elements.

Sandbridge Technologies leads the way in mobile phone baseband reprogramming using SDR. Its architecture, dubbed as Reprogrammable Universal Access Platform (RUAP), is a predominantly software based solution that allows complete re-usability of the DSP die. Sandbridge's 3G mobile handset chip is capable of operating with practically all the radio protocols required for a typical multi-functional and multi-mode mobile platform. The protocols supported by the chip include GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA, CDMA2000, EV-DO, Wi-Fi, DVB-H and GPS and multimedia formats such as MPEG-4 H.264, MP3 and WMA! What's more, HSPDA and WiMAX are also in the offing. Architecturally, this development marks a departure from the fixed function ASIC. The re-usability feature allows the OEMs to integrate newer features in the handsets using the over-the-air facility. Based on the Sandblaster Instruction Set Architecture, the multi-threaded (eight simultaneous hardware threads) architecture of the chip, along with the supporting software offer a high level of parallel software processing power.

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