The Mobile Life: Carry Small, Live Large

In his keynote address, “The Mobile Renaissance: The Era of Smarter SoCs,” Gadi Singer, vice president of the Mobility Group and general manager of the SoC Enabling Group at Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.), shared his compelling vision on the future of the mobile industry.

Alexander E. Braun, Senior Editor -- Semiconductor International, 7/17/2008 10:00:00 AM

In his keynote address, “The Mobile Renaissance: The Era of Smarter SoCs,” Gadi Singer, vice president of the Mobility Group and general manager of the SoC Enabling Group at Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.), shared his compelling vision on the future of the mobile industry.

Singer focused on changes in the mobile landscape — some continuous, others revolutionary — noting that although many of today’s mobile products are variations of devices we have had for some time, such as notebooks, cell phones, GPS and handheld gaming, there is an ongoing transition to a set of high-integration devices with very high levels of portability, performance, connectivity and capabilities. “We’re at the knee of what will be a major innovation curve for the mobile tech space,” he said.

Singer analyzed what he considers three of the major drivers behind this progress, each powerful by itself, but together creating a synergistic push. “The first is the Internet,” he said. “It changes everything we do — entertainment, work and communication — and continues to grow, impacting things such as social networking, high-definition video and user-generated content.” This started with stationary systems, such as the PC. Now, as Internet-enabled devices multiply and become increasingly mobile, the number of people regularly accessing the Internet will grow to two billion over the next five years, and they will demand the current level of capabilities and use in increasingly more mobile formats.

There are three major drivers behind mobile applications: connectivity, the Internet and Moore’s Law.

“The Internet is becoming the hub for all connected activity. It is a major driving force, making it essential for mobile devices to be connected to it, supporting software and applications enabled by the Internet, to provide a fuller experience.” Singer added that five years ago, most of the world’s silicon was not necessarily connected, and that five years from now, most of it will be connected with very high bandwidth.

The second major force is connectivity. While mobile device bandwidth has consistently increased, over the past several years it has expanded substantially with the move to 3G, and with additional connectivity such as LTE, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, Bluetooth and GPS, all of which enable significant data transfer rates. This is both a challenge and an opportunity because now these devices must be capable of supporting, interpreting and manipulating very high data rates.

According to Singer, the third major driver is Moore’s Law itself — the ability to put an increasingly larger number of transistors on a given die size, enabling the production of complex systems using small die with low-power requirements. “Moore’s Law will continue as it has because, although the economics behind it change going from 45 nm to 22 nm and below, the same benefits are derived from shrinking the transistor and increasing die density,” he said.

Future mobile systems will be overwhelmingly consumer-oriented and feature high integration and computing capacity. Their utility will expand, driven by consumer requirements, bringing into being more varied mobile devices. “I have a vision of ‘Carry Small, Live Large,’” Singer said. “Your mobile devices will easily interact with you and other people. But there will also be many other devices in your environment; for example, when you go to the airport, your devices will interact with all kinds of infrastructure that can inform you about the weather, changes in flight schedules, your departure gate and other relevant information.” Thus, there will not only be a proliferation of mobile devices, but also of stationary ones that interact with them.

Finally, Singer looked at system-on-a-chip (SoC) evolution. “What we call smart SoCs are characterized by a high level of integration on the die, not only of transistors, but sophisticated IP blocks and elements. SoCs can have graphics and video systems with their own sophisticated computing; the same goes for audio, I/O systems and multi-com integration.” Singer went on to say that the demand for building blocks for this level of integration and complexity is an opportunity for SoC design houses to create sophisticated solutions. Much of the intelligence that resided on the motherboard is shifting to the SoC, providing opportunities for specialization, specification and differentiation. “The industry must cooperate on standards and other areas that will allow plug-and-play at the IP and component level, or between devices, to materialize this connected world,” he said.