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This paper gives an overview of the Blackghost 1.0 system-on-chip (SoC) from Qualcomm Research, which was our first test chip that paved the way toward the commercialization of Qualcomm’s most recent ultra-low-power Blackghost SoC family. Specifically designed for battery powered Internet of Things, sensor fusion, wearables, and e-medical applications, this highly integrated SoC delivers high-power efficiency through low-power innovations in architecture and circuit domains. It integrates a small footprint sensor control processor based on ARM Cortex-M0, a vision classifier processor, a streaming DSP hardware accelerator, an ultra-low-power analog-front-end, and an on-die power management unit with direct Li-Ion battery attach capability. The die size of this prototype chip is $3\times 3$ mm2 in a 28LP CMOS process technology. To date, this SoC family has successfully progressed to the mass production of near-threshold computing. The logic computation operates at near-threshold voltages (<0.6 V) at frequencies up to 50 MHz and draws less than $9~\mu $ A/MHz from the directly attached battery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of cdma2000 1xE V-DO systems to multicarrier EV-DO (supported by 1xEV-DO Revision B) is discussed in this article. Multicarrier EV-DO offers a backward-compatible upgrade to leverage existing 1xEV-DO networks and terminals. It allows a software upgrade to multicarrier EV-DO using 1xEV-DO Revision A base station hardware. Multicarrier operation achieves higher efficiencies relative to single-carrier by exploiting channel frequency selectivity, improved transmit efficiencies on the reverse link, and adaptive load balancing across carriers. Multicarrier EV-DO enables very high-speed download, high-resolution video telephony, and improved user experience with concurrent applications. The sources of higher efficiency are discussed in detail in this article. It also enables hybrid frequency reuse deployment scenarios that enable spectrally efficient operation and significant improvement in edge coverage performance with hardware-efficient implementations. The evolved wider bandwidth systems (up to 20 MHz) based on multicarrier EV-DO offer operators a cost-effective solution that competes favorably with other technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents key enhancements to CDMA2000 1xEV-DO systems embodied in 1xEV-DO Revision A. These enhancements provide significant gains in spectral efficiency and substantial improvements in Q0S support relative to 1xEV-DO Revision 0. In particular, 1xEV-DO Revision A approximately doubles the uplink spectral efficiency and doubles the number of terminals with delay-sensitive applications that can be simultaneously supported on the system. It provides substantial reduction in latencies (approximately 50 percent) during both connection setup and the connected state. It offers comprehensive network control over terminal and application performance to enable the desired trade-offs between capacity and latency! fairness, thereby providing full QoS support and enhanced user experience. It also provides coverage improvement (approximately 1.5 dB) relative to 1xEV-DO Revision 0. This enables operators to offer services such as VoIP, video telephony, mobile network gaming, push-to-talk, Web browsing, file transfer, and video on demand to a larger number of simultaneous users. The 1xEV-DO Revision A network can provide downlink sector capacity of 1500 kb!s and uplink capacity of 500 kb/s (two-way receive diversity) or 1200 kb/s (four-way receive diversity) with 16 active users per sector, using just 1.25 MHz of the spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]