HW/SW co-design for SoC on mobile platforms

Abstract

Portable platforms like cell phones, PDAs, and notebooks get more and more feature-packed every year. Given the very short life-cycles of these products, the set-maker has to be able to add additional selling-features like for example FM/AM radio, TV, and wireless links with a minimum of risk, board space, minimum power consumption and cost onto it's already existing product platform. Systems on chip (SoC) in their truest sense, having no external components, and that are optimized for flexibility and low power consumption is the solution to this challenge. This paper discusses the key features and key circuits of the first "no-external components" FM radio and TV tuners for mobile platforms. Both SoCs make use of resources that are generally available on mobile platforms like a reference clock and a microprocessor. The signal processing path of both ICs is fully controlled by software and adaptable as a result of hardware/software co-design. For the set-maker, both ICs can be virtually treated as digital ICs as there are no "hot" RF components off-chip, nor is any other component off-chip. RF building blocks like a broadband tunable LNA (on the TV IC) and an I/Q oscillator (on the FM IC and TV IC) are discussed in detail.