FSMLabs RTLinux in Working Single Core Cellphone Handset Solution

RTLinux powered 2.5G and 3G cell phones may be in production soon given market trends suggesting that fast real-time capability is one of the key barriers to a broad implementation of Linux in mobile devices. Hard real-time support is ideal for media-rich mobile-phone communications where task-level response requirements for 3G media rich applications such as video streaming and video telephony are in the tens to hundreds of microsecond ranges.

As the mobile phone feature market quickly gravitates to more extensive multimedia functionality, FSMLabs is leading the way to providing handset manufacturers with a common, vendor-neutral real-time approach enabling Linux to control both signal and application planes in single-chipset mobile phone designs. These designs are aimed at the high-volume feature phone market and offer unique advantages to current Linux device architectures using a discreet, secondary application process with their own memory subsystem, leaving the primary, typically ARM9 based CPU to drive the communications modem with a real-time operating system. The latter approach often results in a larger, more expensive phone, with higher power requirements than the one-chip, single-OS Linux phones of the future.

In a recent pioneering development project, FSMLabs and Infineon Technologies AG became the world's first to demonstrate working mobile phone prototypes based on real-time Linux. Indeed, the RTLinux-powered Infineon prototype delivers what many companies have been promising - a single core handset solution. The ARM9 core runs the WCDMA/EDGE/GPRS/GSM protocol stack developed by Comneon, a 100% subsidiary of Infineon, and drivers for Infineon's advanced 2G/3G radio chips in the RTCore real-time domain, and it runs the Linux platform plus smart phone utilities and graphical user interfaces in the non real-time domain. Getting rid of the extra processor allows bill of materials (BOM) reductions, speeds the move towards highly integrated phone platforms, simplifies manufacturing, opens up methods of power savings, and removes performance bottlenecks imposed by the legacy serial line communication with the modem processor.