Today's Smartphones Research Articles

Manufacturing Readiness of BVA(TM) Technology for Fine-Pitch Package-on-Package

Package-on-Package (PoP) has become common for packaging the processor and memory subunit in today's smartphones and tablets. Today's PoPs provide only about 300 interconnects between the base and top packages due to physical limitations posed by existing manufacturing methods. As a result, memory data bandwidth is limited to 25.6 GB/s at 1600 MHz DDR signal speeds. With a trend towards System-on-Chip (SoC) mobile processors with multi-core CPU, memory bandwidth requirements are sharply increasing. To meet these needs, a wide IO memory industry standard has emerged to specify 512 memory data interconnects. This standard provides about 4 times current bandwidths (>100 GB/s) even at lower 800 MHz DDR signal speeds. For memory devices to offer 512 data lines, a total of about 1000 interconnects are needed to include the accompanying address, control, power and ground signals required for operation. No current PoP technology can offer 1000 interconnects, due to limited fine-pitch capability within the standard 14mm x 14mm package outline. Although industry expectation is for Through-Silicon-Via (TSV) technology to eventually offer a high-bandwidth solution, TSV manufacturing is still being developed and not expected to be widely available for a number of years. A new high-performance PoP interconnect technology called Bond-Via-Array (BVA [TM]) has been developed to provide high-bandwidth interconnect capability today. A BVA test vehicle package demonstrating 1020 processor to memory interconnects at 0.24mm pitch has been assembled inside the industry-standard 14mm x 14mm package outline. These fine pitch vertical interconnects are achieved utilizing well established wirebond equipment and process. As a result, BVA provides a cost-effective and reliable path to high-performance PoP. This paper details equipment and process developments related to high-volume-manufacturing (HVM) readiness of BVA technology. In addition to assembly process and equipment, test hardware that can accommodate fine pitch wire-tip interconnects needs to be demonstrated for manufacturing readiness. Socket and test hardware development and verification studies utilizing the latest 0.24mm pitch test vehicle are underway in cooperation with a 3rd party test hardware supplier. Goals include demonstrating feasibility of the fine-pitch PoP test approach as well as establishing sources for such hardware. In summary, BVA PoP technology enables 1000+ interconnects in a standard PoP outline while taking advantage of existing materials and infrastructure. To ensure manufacturing readiness, package assembly and test demonstrations are being carried out with third party vendors. Results indicate that with proper design and process optimization, high yield assembly and test is possible, and this technology is ready for high volume manufacturing.

Using Smartphones in Supply Chains

Using Smartphones in Supply Chains Mobile phones have settled in our lives for good. The technological development made them actual miniature computers with significant computing capability and many diverse functions, which earned them the name „smartphones”. They create new possibilities of application, also in business environments. As it turns out, already today smartphones are the most popular mobile devices used in supply chain management. Surely, as versatile and multi-functional devices, they will gain even larger share in the implementation of business tasks in the foreseeable future. The purpose of this paper is to describe the potential areas in supply chain management smartphones can be used in, compared to the current trends. The specified examples of application will be used to draw conclusions regarding the expected effects of use and most promising areas of implementation. These deliberations will be put in a wider social context, which is inevitable if we are to treat the consumer as the last link in the supply chain which, owing to the reported demand, is becoming a causative factor in all flows of goods.

Mobile learning in the last mile

For every personal computer in a developing country there are roughly five mobile phones. Although many of these continue to be older or low-end models—despite the continued rise of the smartphone—today’s high-end devices have as much processing power as a personal computer did in the mid-1990s. In comparison, personal computers today have more number-crunching ability than all the computers that took the Apollo rocket to the moon over thirty years ago. The boundary between mobile phones, handheld game consoles, entertainment devices, and personal computers is becoming increasingly blurred, with devices such as the Blackberry, Android-driven smartphones, GPS-enabled mobile phones, Ultra Mobile PCs, and tablets breaking new ground. Technology continues to advance at a remarkable pace, opening up new opportunities few people would have considered a few short years ago. Convergence and mobility—and increasingly ‘‘ultra mobility’’—are words on everyone’s minds; even Intel announced a ‘‘major shift to ultra mobility’’ as recently as 2011. According to Dennis Moore, chief executive of OQO, an early pioneer of Ultra Mobile PCs, ‘‘Ultra mobility is the ability to access all of your information, get in touch with anyone you want to, collaborate with anyone, and run any application you want from anywhere on the planet’’ (cited in Waters 2008). While the growth of cloud-based services has been a major driver of this vision, device convergence has also had an important role to play: music, games, video and live television can all now run or stream over a single device, often a mobile phone. The days of carrying a separate phone, camera, games console, and music player are long over. Indeed, many people are beginning to question the use of the word phone at all, preferring to refer to these new gadgets as mobile communication devices, or digital assistants. ‘‘mLearning’’ is a term regularly used to describe the many educational possibilities opened up by this convergence, whether it be getting exam results by mobile phone, watching lessons on mobile video, podcasting a lecture via iPod, or playing structured language games on a Nintendo or Playstation. These are still relatively early days, but

QoI-Aware Energy-Efficient Participatory Crowdsourcing

Today's smartphones not only serve as a means of personal communication device, but are also fundamentally transforming the traditional understanding of crowdsourcing to an emerging type of participatory, task-oriented applications. It aims to support the so-called Citizen Science efforts for knowledge discovery, to understand the human behavior and measure/evaluate their opinions. In this paper, to facilitate the above scenarios, we propose a novel energy-efficient participatory crowdsourcing framework that meets the quality-of-information (QoI) requirements of the request in a distributed manner. Specifically, we extend the traditional framework of Gur Game for distributed decision-making to recommend the level of information contribution for each participant, by merging the multiple automaton chains into a single chain with multiple steady states. We evaluate the proposed scheme under the MIT social evolution data set, where the QoI requirements of the request are successfully achieved, with a satisfactory level of energy consumption fairness among participants, of negligible computational complexity. Finally, we explore the impact of community structure on the proposed algorithm, and propose a feasible method to facilitate the local data aggregation.

Personalization in Mobile Activity Recognition System Using K-Medoids Clustering Algorithm

Nowadays mobile activity recognition (AR) has been creating great potentials in many applications including mobile healthcare and context-aware systems. Human activities could be detected based on sensory data that are available on today's smart phone. In this study, we consider mobile phones as an independent device since sending the data to central server can generate privacy issues. Furthermore, applying AR on mobile phone does not only require an effective accuracy rate but also the lowest power consumption. Normally, an AR model learnt from acceleration data of a specific person is distributed to other people to recognize the same activities instead of generating different models individually. This work often cannot create accurate results on the prediction in broad range of participants. Moreover, such AR model also has to allow each user to update his new activities independently. Therefore, we propose an algorithm that integrates Support Vector Machine classifier and K-medoids clustering method to resolve completely the demand.

PLUGAM: Plug-In-Based Adaptation Middleware for Network Layer Protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular communication environments are characterized by highly mobile nodes, frequent topology changes, and a great variation in the number of neighbor vehicles. The network layer (NL) protocols must adapt continuously to these unreliable conditions, hence the growing effort in the development of protocols specific to vehicular networks. The aim of this work is to help create vehicular systems with an adaptive network layer, by means of proposing a middleware based on an adaptation model and using as input the context information of the vehicle. The architecture will build an adaptive network layer using two types of run-time adaptations: modification of NL protocol internal parameters and adaptations where a selection between NL protocols must be made. To assess the feasibility of our approach, we present two case study examples and present a first prototype. In addition, we briefly evaluate the adaptation presented in case study 1 via simulation, and we found that it produces 20% less control overhead. Furthermore, we present an analysis of the prototype performance to get a rough idea on the cost of using the middleware in the vehicular system; results show that it is feasible to implement the middleware in hardware similar to today's midrange smartphones.

Towards a Smartphone based Multimode Sensing

Abstract With rapid strides being made in mobile computing technology, today smart phones are not just devices for mobile communications and small computations, but may also be considered as a full scale PC embedded with a rich set of sensors such as accelerometers, GPS, Microphone, Camera and Ambient Light Sensor. Application based these integrated sensors are being developed for various domains. Even though a range of sensors available on smart phones are sufficient for several applications, but some applications like monitoring air quality or pollutants, would need external sensors along with existing sensors. This paper this presents brief description about architecture for seamless integration of external sensors with the smartphone, Tri-Coder Framework. We develop easily deployable sensor cloud enabled smartphone applications to record and retrieve sensor data in a dynamically changing environment that could potentially increase situational awareness.

스마트폰 이용동기와 활용능력이 스마트패드 사용의도에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구

The growing interest in smartphones has increased the number of studies conducted on technology acceptance and user satisfaction. It is now over two years since the launching of smartphones, but there are not many researches on the usage behavior of today's smartphone users. Smart devices have evolved from smartphone to smart pad and smart TV, but there are still not many studies on variables such as knowledge about the parent product and the ability to use it. With this, I decided to study how the motivation and the ability of using smartphones affected the smartphone user's intention to use smartpads. This study presents the usage behavior of smartphone users and proves that the ability to use a parent product (smartphone) affects the user's intention to use an extension product (smartpad). The research results showed that the smartphone usage ability affected both variety of use and rate of use. The convenience and passing time factors affected variety of use; and the social interaction, entertainment and passing time factors affected rate of use. As for the intention to use smartpads, the smartphone usage ability and variety of use positively affected the smartphone user's intention to use smartpads. This study showed that the more the user used a smartphone to pass time and for convenience, the more effectively the user could use various functions. It proves that the variety of use of smartphone is highly related to the acceptance of smartpads. This study also proves that usage ability is an important factor in using innovative products, such as smart devices.

Spatial Computing and Social Media in the Context of Disaster Management

The growing trend of using smartphones and other GPS-enabled devices has provided new opportunities for developing spatial computing applications and technologies in unanticipated and unprecedented ways. Some capabilities of today's smartphones highlight the potential of citizen sensors to enable the next generation of geoinformatics. One promising application area for this is social media and its application to disaster management. Dynamic, real-time incident information collected from onsite human responders about the extent of damage, the evolution of the event, the community's needs, and responders' ability to deal with the situation, combined with information from the larger emergency management community, could lead to more accurate and real-time situational awareness. This would enable informed decisions, better resource allocation and thus a better response and outcome to the total crisis. In this context, the US Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate (DHS-S&T) has initiated the Social Media Alert and Response to Threats to Citizens" (SMART-C) program, which aims to develop citizen participatory sensing capabilities for decision support throughout the disaster life cycle via a multitude of devices and modalities. Here, the authors provide an overview of the envisioned SMART-C system's capabilities and discuss some of the interesting and unique challenges that arise due to the combination of spatial computing and social media within the context of disaster management.

Refactoring android Java code for on-demand computation offloading

Computation offloading is a promising way to improve the performance as well as reducing the battery power consumption of a smartphone application by executing some parts of the application on a remote server. Supporting such capability is not easy for smartphone application developers due to (1) correctness: some code, e.g., that for GPS, gravity, and other sensors, can run only on the smartphone so that developers have to identify which parts of the application cannot be offloaded; (2) effectiveness: the reduced execution time must be greater than the network delay caused by computation offloading so that developers need to calculate which parts are worth offloading; (3) adaptability: smartphone applications often face changes of user requirements and runtime environments so that developers need to implement the adaptation on offloading. More importantly, considering the large number of today's smartphone applications, solutions applicable for legacy applications will be much more valuable. In this paper, we present a tool, named DPartner, that automatically refactors Android applications to be the ones with computation offloading capability. For a given Android application, DPartner first analyzes its bytecode for discovering the parts worth offloading, then rewrites the bytecode to implement a special program structure supporting on-demand offloading, and finally generates two artifacts to be deployed onto an Android phone and the server, respectively. We evaluated DPartner on three real-world Android applications, demonstrating the reduction of execution time by 46%-97% and battery power consumption by 27%-83%.

Wiki at war: conflict in a socially networked world

Wiki at War: Conflict in a Socially Networked World By James Jay Carafano [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Dr. Carafano constructs a compelling narrative examining the implications of socially connected populations in the context of conflict and warfare. The author's general thesis is that engaging in the war online is not optional. The book begins an investigation of the history of social networking. The author takes the reader on an interesting course starting with the importance of as technology. Language provides the medium to build relationships, culture, knowledge, and as a tool to share judgments. He effectively uses vignettes to demonstrate how the legacy of tribal language formed the basis of early social networks throughout history. The intriguing stories of how language played a key role in conflict and warfare, beginning with the Mongol Empire and Genghis Khan and the great hunt or the nerge, the Iroquois League during the American Revolution, and the early-nineteenth-century Zulu kingdom in southern Africa, set the tone for the power of social networking. The journey continues to describe the power of myth and storytelling to transfer knowledge within and across social networks. The evolution of sharing information by messenger systems dating back four thousand years to the optic telegraph in the Napoleonic wars through today's digital systems revolutionized how humans communicated in peace and in war. The historical portion of the book does an excellent job establishing the importance of the message, language, and story enabled by the technology to enhance the concept of social networking. The author moves to contemporary history with a chapter describing the birth of the computer age and Web 2.0. The invention of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENAC) by Professor John Mauchly (1942-45) was a watershed moment for the potential of social networking as well as communication in warfare. Dr. Carafano argues that the invention of the computer sets the stage for creating many kinds of machines enabling communication. Think about today's smart phones, digital music players, personal computers, and tablets. The ENAC was a key enabler to enhance the ability of humans to communicate in the context of social networking. The next piece of the puzzle was to create architecture for computers to communicate. Carafano spends time discussing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency invention creating a communication system linking computers to share data over long distances (ARPRANET). The development of ARPRANET is a fascinating story of technological innovation that ultimately evolved into the World Wide Web. Most of us probably know the general facts surrounding the birth of the computer and the World Wide Web. This section provides a much deeper comprehension of the people and technology leading to the advanced social networking tool available today. The remaining chapters in the book travel through the implications of social networking today. The author points out that social networking and connected populations present significant challenges to senior policymakers, military leaders, and planners. The nature of the adversary online is extremely diverse. Dr. Carafano provides a useful framework to consider several varieties of adversaries. …

Age Based User Interface In Mobile Operating System

This paper proposes the creation of different interfaces in the mobile operating system for different age groups. The different age groups identified are kids, elderly people and all others. The motive behind creating different interfaces is to make the smartphones of today's world usable to all age groups.

On the Anatomy of a Modern Biotelemetry System: A Cell phone Paradigm

Totally implantable biotelemetry systems are becoming very useful tools in both academic and pharmaceutical research laboratories. In the past 30 years, implantable biotelemetry systems have made possible a number of studies that required the use remote measurements of parameters such as ECG, blood pressure and temperature. Current and future medical research measurements, however, demand more advanced features and functions from the biotelemetry systems currently available. In the past, biotelemetry implants were very much like the cell phones of that era. Inflexible, unchangeable, preset, analog. Our recently introduced EndoGear modern biotelemetry system, is a powerful, flexible, user configurable, programmable and digital, much like the smartphones of today. The advantages of our biotelemetry implants are the harnessing of demanding applications by incorporating new and advanced sensors, such as blood flow sensors, solid‐state pressure sensors, and modern RF communication protocols. Users can attach and control a variety of add‐on modules that can perform new functions without the need for a completely new implant; i.e., run a new application (app). Commands and data using digital RF communication protocols minimize signal noise and improve signal accuracy. In general, the advancement of modern biotelemetry systems was a direct result of the advancement of modern smartphone technologies. The drive to produce smaller, more advanced electronic parts and more powerful smartphones helped the development of smaller, more advanced and more powerful biotelemetry systems that have the capacity and new capabilities to assist medical researchers to exciting new discoveries.

Smartphones as portable oscilloscopes for physics labs

Given that today's smartphones are mobile and have more computing power and means to measure the external world than early PCs, they may also revolutionize data collection, both in structured physics laboratory settings and in less predictable situations, outside the classroom. Several examples using the internal sensors available in a smartphone were presented in earlier papers in this column.1, 2 But data collection is not limited only to the phone's internal sensors since most also have a headphone port for connecting an external microphone and speakers. This port can be used to connect to external equipment in much the same way as the game port on the early Apple II was used in school labs. Below is an illustration using the headphone port to receive data from an external circuit: smartphones as a portable oscilloscope using commercially available hardware and applications.

Indoor pedestrian displacement estimation using Smart phone inertial sensors

The embedded inertial sensors in today's Smart phones have added the facility to use them for localisation and tracking applications. The benefit of using them for localisation purpose is that no extra infrastructure is to be installed in contrast to other existing positioning technologies. Inertial navigation only provides the information relative to initial point, so it is suitable for short distance positioning. However, integration of inertial navigation with other positioning technologies can be used for precise localisation. In this paper we introduce a mechanism for indoor pedestrian positioning using a combination of accelerometer and compass. Three different Smart phone placement modes (idle, hand held and listening) are investigated and a comparison of different pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) techniques is presented.

Mobile Attacks and Defense

In this paper smartphones are discussed. Today's smartphone are more common than computers. In fact, smart phones are simply computers with extra hardware-namely, a GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) radio and a baseband processor to control it. These extra features are great, but with the power they provide, there's also a threat. Today, smartphones are becoming targets of attackers in the same way PCs have been for many years. This paper focus on the security models of two smart phone operating systems: Apple's iOS and Google's Android. These two have a special place in my heart because I was the first to publicly exploit both of them.

UV Lasers Enable Smart Phones and Other Microelectronics

AbstractThe smaller package sizes and increased functionality of today's smart phones create numerous manufacturing challenges, many of which are now being solved with high performance UV lasers.

A survey of mobile phone sensing

Mobile phones or smartphones are rapidly becoming the central computer and communication device in people's lives. Application delivery channels such as the Apple AppStore are transforming mobile phones into App Phones, capable of downloading a myriad of applications in an instant. Importantly, today's smartphones are programmable and come with a growing set of cheap powerful embedded sensors, such as an accelerometer, digital compass, gyroscope, GPS, microphone, and camera, which are enabling the emergence of personal, group, and communityscale sensing applications. We believe that sensor-equipped mobile phones will revolutionize many sectors of our economy, including business, healthcare, social networks, environmental monitoring, and transportation. In this article we survey existing mobile phone sensing algorithms, applications, and systems. We discuss the emerging sensing paradigms, and formulate an architectural framework for discussing a number of the open issues and challenges emerging in the new area of mobile phone sensing research.

Personal Information Access Using Proactive Search and Mobile Hypertext

A new framework combining proactive search with mobile hypertext lets mobile phone users avoid text entry and tailors search results to suit the context. Mobile phones and devices are evolving steadily, adding increasingly advanced capabilities. Today's smart phones, for example, have PClike functionality with complete operating system software that provides a platform for developers. Even phones without an operating system often have such functions as email, Internet navigation, music players, e-book readers, and GPS, in addition to the usual text messaging (short message service, SMS), camera, and phone. So now, besides holding telephone numbers and text messages, mobile phones also allow access to video clips, calendars, task lists, notes, and so on.

Non-volatile storage for mobile phones

The demands made on non-volatile storage systems in mobile phones are changing. in the past, just a few of kilobytes of storage was needed for a message archive, simple address book and other low data usage applications. Today's smart phones require anything from just a few megabytes to tens of megabytes of memory. With the increased demand for fast, reliable and high capacity on-board memory in today's 2.5G-3G handsets, and with size and cost limitations becoming ever more critical, NAND flash and chip-based disks in particular are emerging as important technologies in on-board non-volatile storage solutions. The introduction of MLC NAND is a clear indication of the cost and size advantages of NAND over NOR are here to stay for quite some time. However, NOR flash will remain a key player in the voice-centric handset segment and may also have a place in other mobile applications.