In other words, the SoCs/CPUs for the mobile market must have enough performance to perform today's demanding mobile information and communication applications, and at the same time must consume very low power to increase the battery-operated time of the mobile devices.

The key applications in the mobile market can be classified as follows. Some of these applications can be combined/merged onto the same device.

Bluetooth Peripherals
Bluetooth wireless technology is a short-range communications technology intended to replace the cables connecting portable and/or fixed devices while maintaining high levels of security. The key features of Bluetooth technology are robustness, low power, and low cost. The Bluetooth technology is defined to allow a wide range of devices to connect and communicate with each other. A Bluetooth enabled device can connect to other Bluetooth enabled devices in proximity.

A fundamental Bluetooth wireless technology strength is the ability to simultaneously handle both data and voice transmissions.

This enables users to enjoy variety of innovative solutions such as a hands-free headset for voice calls, printing and fax capabilities,and synchronizing PDA, laptop, and mobile phone applications.

Mobile phones (Voice, Feature, or Smart phones)
A mobile telephone or cellular telephone (commonly "mobile phone" or "cell phone") is a long-range, portable electronic device used for mobile communication. In addition to the standard voice function of a telephone, current mobile phones can support many additional services such as SMS for text messaging, email, packet switching for access to the Internet, and MMS for sending and receiving photos and video. Most current mobile phones connect to a cellular network of base stations (cell sites), which is in turn interconnected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

Personal digital assistants
Personal digital assistants (PDAs) are handheld computers that were originally designed as personal organizers, but became much more versatile over the years. PDAs have many uses: calculation, use as a clock and calendar, accessing the Internet, sending and receiving E-mails, video recording, typewriting and word processing, use as an address book, making and writing on spreadsheets, scanning bar codes,use as a radio or stereo, playing computer games, recording survey responses, and Global Positioning System (GPS). Newer PDAs also have both color screens and audio capabilities, enabling them to be used as mobile phones (smartphones), web browsers, or portable media players.

Many PDAs can access the Internet, intranets or extranets via Wi-Fi, or Wireless Wide-Area Networks (WWANs). One of the most significant PDA characteristics is the presence of a touch screen.

Personal navigation device
Personal navigation device uses GPS technology to provide location-based services and applications to a moving individual. A person can use a personal navigation device to find directions, record routes, search nearby stores, get real-time traffice information, and so on.

Portable media players
A portable multimedia player (PMP) is a self-reliant electronic device that is capable of storing and playing files in one or more media formats. The media data is typically stored on a hard drive, microdrive, or flash memory. The main feature of portable media players is their versatility: being able to load and play different formats of video, such as MPEG, DivX, etc.; audio, such as MP3,WAV, etc.; digital images, such as BMP, JPEG, and GIF; and interactive media, like flash animations. Portable media players typically feature a color LCD or OLED screen. Various portable media players include the ability to record video and audio, and some have built-in card readers like SD or MMC, which makes it convenient to upload media directly to the player.

In the near future, the added wireless capabilities will allow a portable media player to stream audio and video clips directly from the media source, futher increases its convenience of uses.

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In addition to content delivery mechanisms, the differences on the output granularity, power consumption, and cost also leads to the wide-range of requirements of multimedia devices. Home multimedia devices require higher and higher resolutions for video display, and this creates more pixels to be processed and transferred in the same amount of time. On the other hand, a low-cost cell phone may run software decoder using the CPU in its SoC for the small and low-resolution screen. Those multimedia devices are getting even more complicated when more and more media are converging together.

To help customers tackle the growing and diversified requirements in multimedia SoC’s, Andes offers AndeScore processor core family, associated software infrastructure and codec acceleration engines (thru partners):

Efficient processor architecture

AndeStar 16-bit/32-bit inter-mixable instruction set: allows compiler to generate very compact code. Audio acceleration instruction set: provide high-quality MP3 decode with low power consumption. AndeScore-internal DMA engines – hide memory access latency while CPU is processing. Flexible configuration – allows customers to choose the most efficient configuration for their applications.

Raw CPU performance

AndeScore processor core family provides a wide range of performance based on core selection, targeted process and standard cell libraries.

Low power consumption

AndeScores are all designed with extensive clock gating and advanced microarchitecture to reduce power. Also provided is a mechanism for customers to efficiently implement their power management.

Low total silicon cost

AndeScores are designed with silicon cost in mind. Careful tradeoffs are made to achieve good performance/cost and power/cost. In addition, flexible configurability gives customers to add and drop hardware features based on their own tradeoffs. The efficient inter-mixable 16-bit/32-bit instruction set further reduces the code size for the smallest ROM cost and runtime footprint.

Powerful development tools

standard features, plus profiling and tracing to reduce software development cycle and achieve fast product time-to-market.

Operating Systems

Linux for full-featured systems and Nucleus for small footprint devices.

Audio/video codec

Audio codec using baseline instruction set: recommended when silicon cost is more important than power consumption. Audio codec using acceleration instruction set: recommended when power consumption is more important than silicon cost. Video codec using baseline instruction set: recommended when power consumption is not the most important factor and low resolution is needed. Video codec using external (partners’) acceleration hardware: recommended for high resolution devices.

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Andes provides solution for thin client application from view point of both hardware and essential software.Andes N12 32 bit CPU is embedded for the thin client platform which also integrates essential IP of GPU, Ethernet MAC, USB, DRAM controller, RTC, INTC, DMA, WDT and etc. With such highly integration, the solution is very compact to fix in small form factor and very low power consumed for the application.

Linux is ported on the Andes thin client platform. Essential middleware and software like X11, Blackbox, RDP, VNCviewer, telenet, ssh, and Firefox are ported and optimized.

Andes thin client solution

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