Smartphones

Key Challenges

Although smartphone technology has undergone rapid evolutions over the past decade, emerging applications and exploding data exchanges are constantly stretching the capacity of smartphones to new limits.

To ensure customers enjoy the best user experience, smartphone manufacturers must combine state-of-the-art hardware components with an optimized operating system. This means that designers have to make tradeoffs between a number of key factors including smartphone size, battery life and performance.

Here is a list of some of the challenges smartphone manufacturers are facing during the product design phase:

• Determine the optimal screen size for the best user experience, while limiting the overall weight of the smartphone within a reasonable range;
• Enhance the smartphone's system security and user's privacy with functions including face recognition, fingerprint sensing and other biometric detection features;
• Establish fast, reliable and secure connectivity to access mobile services on networks and adjacent devices and accessories;
• Provide highly intelligent features to monitor user activity trends and health parameters and react accordingly.

Our Products and Solutions

As a creator of unique technologies and products that provide our customers the best solutions to address their challenges and opportunities, ST provides both mobile platform suppliers and mobile device manufacturers (OEM/ODM) with a complete range of products and development resources to help the design of leading-edge mobile devices.

With a complete range of low-power products (Bluetooth Low Energy ICs, 60-GHz RF modules, high-integration filters, etc.), our RF offer includes RF SOI technologies designed to improve wireless connectivity performance.

In addition to our portfolio of MCUs for specific low-power task control, our MEMS motion and environmental sensors as well as image sensors and time-of-flight devices can significantly enhance the user experience.

ST offers a wide range of products enabling NFC data exchange or more advanced secure mobile transaction applications such as mobile payments based on embedded secure elements for authentication (eSE) and secure cellular (eSIM) solutions.

Along with a wide range of dedicated high-integration protection devices such as ESD protection and EMI filtering devices to ensure reliable connections via USB and HDMI devices as well as access to SD cards, ST offers a complete range of analog products and high-efficiency power and energy management devices optimized for battery-powered systems including touchscreen power management and wireless charging solutions.

Moreover, ST provides a comprehensive set of both hardware and software development tools and other developer resources to help you reduce development time and costs while gaining market share thanks to a shorter time to market.