Hardware Platform Supporting Smartphones

In recent years, propelled by Apple Inc. and Google Inc., the popularity of smartphones has skyrocketed. By the end of March 2012, the proportion of smartphones in relation to all mobile phones sold in Japan exceeded 70%. Their user interface, unlike that of feature phones, is a touchscreen, which is getting bigger with higher resolution. Moreover, as network speeds continue to increase (particularly for Internet access), data traffic volumes are increasing exponentially. This has led to a challenging problem—giving smartphones the processing power required to handle large volumes of data (power equivalent to that of PCs just a few years ago) while keeping power consumption at a level appropriate for a mobile device. This paper describes the evolution of the application processor used on the high-performance hardware platform supporting Fujitsu’s smartphones and Fujitsu’s approach to solving the technical problems related to the performance and power saving required of smartphones.