Mobile Handset Design

15

Anatomy of a UMTS Mobile Handset

15.1 Introduction

3G mobile terminals should be capable of supporting many complex applications, including multimedia. There is a wide variety of types, ranging from portable phones, PC-cards, video phones, to personal digital assistance (PDA) types. The UE functionalities are implemented in the software and in the hardware. The hardware components are divided into modem hardware and application hardware. The modem hardware is needed to support the radio modem functionality and the application hardware is needed for vocoders, imaging, video encoders, display, and so on. A typical 3G handset includes a microphone, CMOS imager and MPEG-4 encoder, keyboard, a smart card, speaker, display, RF module, baseband processing transceiver modules, and so on. The software components can be divided into several modules as described for the case of a GSM mobile phone. However, the radio modem physical layer processing software and radio protocol software modules will be different from a GSM phone.

In Chapter 10 we have discussed the various components of a GSM mobile phone. In the present chapter, we will discuss the WCDMA based 3G mobile phone architecture and some of its internal modules.

15.2 Mobile System Architecture

We discussed the CDMA techniques in detail in Chapter 5. As an example, in Figure 15.1 the simple architecture of a CDMA based mobile phone is shown (for IS-95 based system).

Although many modules are similar to the GSM phone, spreading and ...