NoTA - revolutionizing mobile phones
At NXP, we're working with Nokia to revolutionize the way mobile phones are designed.
For the past three years, we've been collaborating with Nokia on developing a new concept, called NoTA (Network on Terminal Architecture), a flexible, service-based platform that offers scalability in features, performance, and cost. As an early adopter of the approach, we're now validating the technique with a joint NXP-Nokia research project, and are cosponsoring the first-ever NoTA conference.
First-ever NoTA event
NoTA 2008, which will be held at the Hilton Kalastajatorppa in Helsinki on June 11, 2008, will bring together an international group of experts with deep knowledge of NoTA. Attendees will gain insight into the business impacts and technical issues, and will get an advanced look at the NoTA strategy and research efforts. Those attending the business impact session will have the opportunity to hear Hans Fleurken, NXP's director of product marketing for mobile multimedia, give a talk, titled 'Using NoTA in a real-life commercial system.'
To find out more about NoTA 2008, click here.
To link to the NoTA 2008 registration site (June 6, 2008 is the registration deadline), click here.
What is NoTA?
NoTA is a new way of designing mobile phones that promises to transform the market. It addresses the many issues associated with today's tightly-coupled systems by introducing a new architecture built around subsystems, or modules. NoTA was introduced by a group of companies, led by Nokia, and is being developed as an industry-wide, open standard.
Why do we need it?
Ask any developer about the challenges of delivering competitive mobile phones, and you'll get a pretty long list of answers. There's the high cost of system design and integration, with hundreds of man-years spent creating hardware and software systems for a range of products. There's the extremely high cost of validation, coupled with degrading reliability. There's the high cost of owning large IP portfolios, and, as always, the pressure to innovate within increasingly short lead times.
The NoTA approach promises to change all that. It moves away from the tightly coupled architecture widely in use today and implements a distributed, modular system. The phone is no longer centered around a single, powerful application engine, but instead uses a network of so-called subsystems. Each subsystem, or module, performs a specific task, such as application processing, storage, connectivity, or multimedia, and communicates with the rest of the system via service nodes that can be based on open standards (e.g. Open Max, Open Vg, or Open GL ES).
There are several reasons why using a modular approach is a good idea. It's easy to swap in new hardware and software functions, so developers can upgrade their designs quickly and can introduce a variety of systems that build on the same basic design. Each subsystem can be optimized for peak performance and can be developed separately, without impacting other portions of the design. Solutions from many different providers all work seamlessly together, so reliability is higher and validation is simpler.
The many benefits of NoTA - especially faster time-to-market, scalability, and easier integration of new features - are attractive to developers in other applications beyond phones and, as a result, may take NoTA into other areas.
Technology overview
The image below gives a high-level representation of the NoTA device architecture.
A NoTA platform consists of loosely connected services running on top of heterogeneous subsystems. The applications in the final product exploit these services. In NoTA-based systems, all service and data communication is routed via the interconnect network. The distributed architecture makes data streaming more efficient by enabling direct communication channels between service nodes.
This diagram gives a high-level view of a NoTA subsystem.
NoTA defines two main levels of interconnect protocols. The high-level protocol stack provides communications functionality for platform services and applications. The low-level protocol provides the physical connection between subsystems. A NoTA subsystem implements a set of services. It is an architectural concept that may or may not align with chip boundaries. There may be several subsystems on a single chip, or a single subsystem may extend beyond the boundaries of a single IC.
Related links
- NoTA 2008 conference
- NoTA 2008 registration
- NXP IC portfolio for cellular handsets
- NXP cellular system solutions
- eNews sign-up
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