The advent of the 3G /4G phone has dramatic implications for power supply designers. The portable power section of a handset was born from discrete electronic components. The adoption of the 3G/4G phones have significantly shorter design cycle time. No longer can cellular handset be developed in terms of years but rather a more realistic timeline would be in months. This has pushed a set of requirement for handset developers to come out with solutions based on portable power platforms rather than design a ground up power solution. In order to shorten the design in cycle a reference design or platform strategy must be deployed. This paper provides an analysis of how future of portable handset power supply requirements can be addressed by a unified power platform.
The flip phone architecture
A clear way in which the cellular phone manufacturer can differentiate is through the use of optimized hardware. The core requirement for certain power supplies has reached a point of stability. For example, a popular voltage seen in the cellular handset is 1.8V core and 3.0V for I/O devices such as a baseband processor. For this type a voltage a certain type and range of power is always needed. A modern day cellular handset is shown in Figure 1. The typical power blocks inside a cellular handset includes; the main processor, the modem, the peripherals, the energy system, and the flip section. Each section has distinct power supply requirement which can be easily quantified.
Figure 1 - Modern day flip phone architecture
The Top Flip
The flip phone platform provides a unified power platform for the ODM / OEM provider. The top level flipper architecture is shown next.
Figure 2 -- Top flip architecture
Figure 3 - The flip architecture in detail