The transformation of the mobile phone from a voice communications device to a multimedia device integrating voice, video and data has revolutionized businesses and lifestyles. India’s smartphone market is showing steady growth with consumers opting for the rich array of features such as web browsing and video streaming offered by smartphones. Mobile applications platforms play an important role in enabling the use of Web 2.0 applications on mobile phones without compromising the experience that users have on PCs. Texas Instruments introduced its OMAP 4 platform earlier this year for a new and multi-media rich user experience.

Convergence Plus spoke to Mr. Gokul Subramaniam, Senior Director - OMAP Platform SW Development, Texas Instruments in detail about the OMAP 4 platform.

CP: What are your growth projections for smartphones and multimedia devices? What factors are driving this growth?

GS: According to Gartner Inc., worldwide smartphone sales forecasts are projected to be more than 36.4 million units in 2009, a 12.7 per cent increase from the same period last year. According to iSuppli, global unit growth for smartphones is projected to be as high as 11.1% in 2009.

In India, the growing popularity of smartphones & multimedia devices can be attributed to the versatility promised by smartphones. Several enterprise smart phones and consumer multimedia feature phones have been launched recently in India and mobile service companies are offering services built around them to their clients. Adding to it, the ease in usage and security features have helped make smartphones the best choice as the next generation communication devices - for both the consumer as well as business enterprises.

CP: What is the role of the OMAP platform in supporting OEM’s in addressing this growth in demand for devices packed with multiple features?

GS: To address the time to market needs of customers and assist them in market demands, the OMAP 4 platform enables OEMs to future generation applications and their processing requirements to cater to a wide range of devices that spans beyond communication – Computing, Multimedia content creation and delivery, Graphics processing and advanced multi-display capabilities, always-on web browsing. All of this with higher degree of performance for enhanced user experience at low power.

The OMAP 4 platform, built in 45-nanometer (nm) process technology, enables mobile device manufacturers to address the expected applications of tomorrow’s handsets, while also providing headroom and programmability to support applications that have yet to be imagined.

CP: How has the OMAP series progressed in terms of technology upgrades? What does the latest in the series – the OMAP 4 have to offer?

GS: The OMAP™ 4 platform includes applications processors with Symmetric Multiprocessing Capabilities, dedicated accelerators for HD Video & Graphics, a comprehensive software suite and power management technology to address the needs of next generation devices across Communications, Computing and Consumer. The OMAP 4 platform delivers several new multimedia-rich user experiences such as 1080p video record and playback, 20 megapixel (MP) imaging and approximately a week of audio playtime. The new platform provides significant improvements in performance and play time compared to today’s most popular smartphones, with 10x faster Web page loading times, more than 7x higher computing performance, 6x higher video resolution, 10x better graphics performance and 6x longer audio play time.

The platform supports popular leading mobile operating systems including Linux variants such as the Android Mobile Platform and LiMo, as well as Symbian OS™ and Microsoft® Windows® Mobile. TI’s Zoom HW reference platform will further enable OEM and open source community to build devices, software and full solution capabilities with fast time to market goals.

TI’s OMAP 4 platform is one of the first dual-core, ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore SMP based architectures and employs parallel processing for higher performance and better power efficiency. SMP’s scalable performance activates only the cores that are needed for that particular process to reduce power consumption or substantially increase performance.

CP: Can the OMAP platform be integrated with any multimedia device? Are there any significant compatibility issues?

GS: The OMAP platform is designed to work optimally on different multimedia devices like smartphones, PDAs, netbooks, navigation devices, HD cameras and digital photo frames.

From a compatibility perspective, the OMAP 4 platform offers flexibility of integration with different modems for which it can be customized, and hence allows OEMs to get more content and also promises better connectivity. The platform delivers complete software that is pre-integrated and validated for different connectivity technology applications like GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth and FM. The OMAP 4 connectivity and modem software optimizes power and performance to make maximum use of TI’s SmartReflex 2 technologies included on the platform.

It also includes pre-integrated hardware and software interfaces to connect easily to any external modem, giving OEMs choice and flexibility and realize faster development times for connectivity as well.

The OMAP 4 platform delivers a comprehensive software suite that supports all the major mobile OSs and is fully integrated and tested up to the application level. By making use of the application framework provided by the OS, the OMAP 4 platform enables an OEM to add or subtract from the application framework to make the right product for its particular market segment.

CP: How can one ensure that performance of a multimedia device matches a device with fewer dedicated features?

GS: OMAP Platforms are built with flexible and extensible architecture that caters to performance and KPI expectations of dedicated devices. Programmability for both general-purpose processors as well as the accelerators (Graphic processing unit, DSPs and other) make the device easily adaptable to the feature and performance needs of devices carrying dedicated features.

OMAP architecture support common capabilities for a variety of devices (like memory interface, interconnect architecture enabling different peripheral support, serial bus interfaces, Display / Sensor support) along with General Purpose ARM processors and Programmable HW accelerators that allows the device to deliver best in class performance for all required features.