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As global handset shipment volume approaches the 1 billion units/year mark and market competition increases, device manufacturers must launch innovative new products to market quickly while striving to reduce heavy development costs.
Delivering today's sophisticated software functionality in high capability operating system (OS) enabled handsets has become complex, requiring longer cycles of porting and testing. Software compatibility between models, even within the same product family, has not always been achievable or possible. The lack of application interoperability among devices is a persistent problem and source of dissatisfaction for everyone.
To streamline the development and deployment process of handset software and address the software fragmentation problem, a la Mobile has developed the Hardware Mobility Engine™ (HME). A key component of a la Mobile's Convergent Linux Platform, the patent-pending HME is designed to bring efficiency and interoperability to handsets while improving time to market and reducing costs.
Much like a personal computer BIOS, the HME enables the handset to describe its hardware features and capabilities to an OS during the device boot process and to provide services to a running OS.
Integrated with the Hardware Mobility Engine, a handset family can use the same binary image of an OS and applications across all models without additional porting. The HME enables the use of a binary image for all handset models supporting similar processor architectures, including those from different vendors (e.g. Intel's XScale PXA 270, TI's OMAP 5912), or across processors supporting forward compatible cores (e.g. ARM 9 to ARM 11).
HME enables a new industry standard for handset deployment efficiency and introduces a level of OS and application mobility and interoperability that does not currently exist in the market.
Figure 1 Hardware Mobility Engine
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