Apps such as Layar and Google Sky Map introduced the public to basic location awareness, and more recently Google Glass and Kopin’s Golden-i have expanded on the concept. However, pervasive, enjoyable augmented reality is hard. This blog has discussed some of these challenges before. The specific challenges related to motion – including variable performance of motion sensors due to age and temperature, magnetic interference and sensor fusion instability – require considerable expertise to overcome. That’s why Hillcrest is excited to be collaborating with ST-Ericsson and VENTURI’s other thought leaders.

Our role in the project is to improve the motion performance through the use of our Freespace® MotionEngine™ Mobile sensor fusion software. Fortunately, this is an area where we have a lot of experience. We’ve been working with MEMS inertial and magnetic sensors in consumer electronics for a decade now, and have partnerships with innovative companies such as Kopin to solve the specific issues associated with motion tracking for augmented reality.

This experience means that our MotionEngine Mobile sensor fusion software, which we ported to ST-Ericsson’s NovaThor platform, is able to significantly enhance the motion performance of the platform. It does this by providing the most responsive, most stable, and most accurate heading, position and 3D motion tracking available. What does this mean from the AR user’s perspective? It means that the application will know exactly what you are looking at. It means that performance will not be affected by changes in temperature or magnetic distortions caused by other electronic devices and metal objects. Lastly, it means when moving the phone around quickly there will be no drift, jumps or jitters as the application quickly identifies where you are looking.

So we’re excited to be working with VENTURI and ST-Ericsson to move augmented reality forward, and to be a part of some of the most innovative applications being developed for smartphones, tablets and HMDs (Head Mounted Displays) today.

1. ARM came with a promise of a new CPU architecture, the CORTEX Ax family, which would significantly increase processing capabilities of the underlying HW.
2. 3G Cellular Network deployments accelerated providing important improvement to data rates available for the consumer on their mobile devices.
3. “High-Level Operating Systems” started to appear – allowing the user out of the Operator’s “walled-garden”.
4. Chinese cellular networks started rapidly deploying and led to the creation of a large amount of local phone makers and brands.
5. Taiwanese and Chinese semiconductor makers started feeding the market with new business models providing extremely fast time-to-market with impressively lower cost than the competition. Differentiation on the UI was not important to this new market – getting the phones out quickly to the millions of new users was the name of the game.

Those developments led to the quick commoditization of what would become known as the “feature phone” platforms.

Fast forward to 2013

Walking around the show, it hit me that we are re-living very similar events. Devices seem to be all very similar in functionality; as a result, functionality innovation is moving fast up the chain value from the phone makers to the application and service providers.

The convergence of digital technologies has changed the face of the Mobile World Congress.

Walking around the Samsung booth, it was clear that it was not only just about phones or tablets anymore. It’s also about computers and cameras, TV and OTT streamers…The common denominator of all the products is the services that the OEM is driving to the end user.

As a consumer, just as all PCs ended up looking the same, all the tablets and phones are starting to look the same. Has it become so difficult to innovate on the products themselves?

Part of the answer is the lack of ability of the platform providers to enable ground-up innovation to their customers. Moving from dual-cores to quad-cores did not deliver on the promise of real improvement of performances and capabilities for the consumer. The race of cores and new CPUs is a dead-end without a real breakthrough of the base technology.

If our competitors continue to want to apply Moore’s law they are soon going to be in big trouble. It was visible that every person visiting our hospitality suite at MWC understood this watching our demos!

Our NovaThor L8580 beats any competing platform you throw at it, not only in performance, but also in power and integration. With the most advanced LTE modem architecture it is very simple: with ST-Ericsson platforms, OEMs and customers have more bang for their buck.

FD-SOI and Thor modem architecture are driving the most amazing and important innovation in wireless platforms this market has seen in a while. And it is such a great feeling of satisfaction to be part of this innovation.

And did we mention that the Thor M7450 supports category 4, up to 15ompbs? Don’t believe us – see the demo here.

We are also showing off the M7400 modem by conducting live VoLTE calls. Our solution offers amazing call clarity with little to no impact on battery life. In addition, if you get out of range of an LTE network or receive a call from someone not using a LTE phone, the modem is able to connect the calls thanks to our ability to ‘fall back’ to HSPA networks.

So as you can see, we had a lot of modem technology to demo at MWC 2013.

• The first and only 3Ghz smartphone processor demonstration (NovaThor L8580)
• The first and only 1Ghz smartphone processor running at 0.6V (NovaThor L8580)
• The first and only single RF Carrier Aggregation modem (Thor M7450)
• A live demonstration of VoLTE calls that are “talk-time” on par with 3G (Thor M7400)

We know you can’t all be at the show so here is a peek at our NovaThor L8580 demo showing how it runs cooler than other mobile processors, thanks in part to our use of FD-SOI technology.

Or if speed is more important to you, the NovaThor L8580 offers that too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We will be adding other demos from the show throughout the week so check back soon.

To address the growing challenges, today we announced the newest addition to our award-winning Thor modem line: the Thor M7450. The M7450 is a multimode, multiband platform that brings LTE Advanced including Carrier Aggregation to the market using a single chip RF transceiver. This small sized modem can support over 17 GSM, HSPA and LTE bands in the same device.

Learn more about the challenges of Carrier Aggregation

For a complete picture about the market for Carrier Aggregation, the challenges faced by operators and device manufacturers and how we solved those challenges with Thor M7450, please read the white paper we have published here.

Showing its performance at Mobile World Congress

The Thor M7450 is being demonstrated by ST-Ericsson in Barcelona this week. We will run the modem at full speed during the whole event. We will also run a demonstration of the single chip radio with Carrier Aggregation to show off its capabilities. If you will be at the show, stop by and check it out.

With support for 150 Mbps (cat4) and the fact that all of the features we added didn’t increase the size of the modem, ST-Ericsson is convinced the M7450 will take Carrier Aggregation to the mainstream market!

It seems I was wrong on one point – the evolution of multicore technology. With the introduction of FD-SOI, it turns out you can do  much better than using a brute-force big-little architecture. FD-SOI offers a cooler, smaller die without the software complexity of core switching.

However, my other predictions about balancing the system and accelerating key algorithms in the device to secure a smooth, high quality user experience and conserve battery power turned out to be true and accurate.

Since then, ST-Ericsson has been working closely with the world leader in Augmented Reality technology, metaio AG of Munich. We are very proud to  be collaborating with Thomas Alt’s brilliant team at metaio, both as close business partners as well as joint participants in the European collaborative research project Venturi. Having decided to integrate metaio’s powerful and proprietary hardware acceleration technology in ST-Ericsson’s future smartphone chipsets we are now taking the cooperation to the next level.

ST-Ericsson already supports the metaio SDK in our products but hardware acceleration will enable even larger screen sizes, better resolution and better tracking accuracy without the power drain penalty associated with competing solutions.

At ST-Ericsson we firmly believe that Augmented Reality is on the verge of takeoff. Projects like Google Glass and Venturi are aggressively driving the technology and will enable the rapid spread to all kinds of products, applications and services.

Together, ST-Ericsson and metaio are augmenting your world.

ST-Ericsson Private Booth: This year, ST-Ericsson will host a private booth  in Hall 2 (#D90) for our guests where we will demonstrate our latest products and technologies. Demos will include (but are not limited to):

• Latest innovations in access and thin modem technology
• Complete LTE platform offering leading edge computing power, video and graphics
• New applications for the NovaThor platform, including the FD-SOI process technology being used in the NovaThor L8580.

ST-Ericsson Public & Partner Booth: Our public booth is open to everyone and is located inside Hall 7 (#E111). ST-Ericsson will be demonstrating our new modem and ModAp technologies as well as showcasing key partners including metaio, Miracast, ZeWall to name a few.

Ericsson Mobile Broadband Area: ST-Ericsson will be supporting the Ericsson ecosystem in Hall 2 (#D140) through demonstrations and expertise in the mobile broadband with our Thor modem line.

China Mobile Booth: The ST-Ericsson Thor M7400 modem will be showcased in China Mobile’s booth in Hall 5 (#I120).

So as you can see, we will be very busy next week and we look forward to seeing some of you at the show.

Not going to be in Barcelona? We will have lots of news and ‘behind-the-scenes’ footage of the show here on our blog  next week so be sure to check back. Or you can always follow us on Twitter or ‘like’ us on Facebook to get our updates.

The challenge

The design of a smartphone is primarily decided by the display size and secondly by battery capacity. Increasing the size of the device to achieve higher bit rates is out of the question. Likewise is decreasing the battery capacity as that will shorten the talk time, surf time, standby time, etc. Therefore, the circuit area of the modem solution in a smartphone device will remain pretty much as it is today.

The same principle applies for other device types. USB dongles have a de facto design with limited size and cannot be radically increased; the design of PC modules is standardized and cannot be significantly altered and Wi-Fi hotspot devices are more attractive and competitive if they are kept as small as possible without limiting the battery capacity.

Many operators are using up to 5 frequency bands which are allocated for WCDMA and LTE. In many cases, operators only have 10 or 15 MHz bandwidth allocations in each band which can be shared between WCDMA and LTE – leaving only 5 or 10 MHz for LTE. To achieve full Category 3 or 4 with bitrates up to 100 and 150 Mbps respectively, a total of 20 MHz bandwidth is required and this can be achieved by utilizing Carrier Aggregation.

Several operators depend on more than one Carrier Aggregation band combination, because different frequency bands and bandwidth allocations are available in different regions. By adding 2 or 3 frequency bands for roaming, a device easily ends up supporting 5 to 7 frequency bands for LTE alone plus one or two Carrier Aggregation band combinations – and all this to support only one operator!

It is well known that device manufacturers want to keep the number of end-product variants down to a minimum to limit development costs and time to market, as well as, to minimize component logistics; therefore, it is likely that a device is not designed to support one single operator but rather a region or a continent. This adds even more frequency bands to a device! Plus the GSM and HSPA bands that will still be needed, it adds up to around 15 bands in one device.

It is easy to realize that the consequence will be a very complex RF subsystem that easily consumes a lot of valuable time to bring to market.

Nevertheless, no device manufacturer or operator will accept a drastically increased cost for the modem sub-system in a device. The conclusion is obvious: the cost per supported frequency band in a device must be significantly decreased to have a competitive solution.

The Solution

A number of criteria need to be met in order to achieve a small sized, commercially competitive solution and still a manageable number of end-product variants:

• Small sized core chipset
• Wide support of frequency bands, both in terms of frequency bands supported and number of concurrent frequency bands in the same design
• A Carrier Aggregation solution that does not add significant cost or introduce a big change in the PCB design
• Band support implemented by a combination of modules with core set of frequency band support and add-on bands as discrete components to get flexibility in terms of band capabilities

In 2014-2015 there will still be market segments where carrier aggregation is not needed. A major advantage is to have a modem solution where Carrier Aggregation has a minor impact on the design and can be easily removed.

In addition to that, a high degree of reusability between different end-product variants is important and provides many advantages for the handset manufacturers, since it decreases the development effort and shortens the time to market for new products. RF components with support for the core frequency bands applicable for a market give these advantages. Well-designed modules also give a simpler PCB design where shorter time is needed to tune and optimize to get the best performance.

Modules combined with an extensive frequency band support on the RF transceiver still offers the flexibility to add and/or remove bands for specific operators and markets without a major impact on the modem design.

ST-Ericsson’s Thor modem platforms are designed to address the challenges described above. Stay connected!

More about FD-SOI, including a white paper, can be found through this link

The reality is much more complex, because several interdependent factors are at play in determining the efficiency of multiprocessing platforms.

To help you navigate between the marketing hype and the reality, we have published a white paper on this topic by Marco Cornero and Andreas Anyuru titled  “Multiprocessing in Mobile Platforms: the Marketing and the Reality” which can be downloaded here.

In this paper we illustrate and compare the main technological options available in multiprocessing for mobile platforms. We show that compared to PCs, the performance of single-processors in mobile platforms is still growing and how, from a software performance and ultimately the end user experience perspective, it is more profitable today to focus on faster dual-core rather than slower quad-core processors.

As part of this discussion we will also demonstrate how FD-SOI process technology benefits dual-core processors even more by providing higher frequency for the same power consumption. All of this results in a simpler, cheaper and more effective solution than competing homogeneous and heterogeneous quad-processors.

So have a look beyond the “multi-core” hype – there is so much more to consider.