June 20, 2007 -- Mobile device designers face a critical question: what functionality should be incorporated in their next-generation designs? Answering this question while simultaneously addressing the market needs of rapid development, lowest cost, and long battery life presents a major challenge. The advent of customer specific standard products is helping designers maximize their design options while minimizing cost and effort.

Because next-generation mobile devices will likely assume a central role in consumer electronics, serving both as a personal device and as key core elements in a full-featured home entertainment and communications system, they must provide many connectivity options. Further, the functions of the portable media player, digital camera/camcorder, game system, and enhanced mobile phone with web browsing and PDA capabilities are converging into a single mobile device.

To enable all these features, the solutions that designers need require a variety of interfaces, including high-capacity storage, WLAN and Bluetooth, GPS and the like. However, the exact mix of functions that the market will demand is difficult to predict.

By Howard Li. (Li is a Senior Marketing Manager at QuickLogic Corp.)