5. Application examples

5.1 Blackberry smartphone

For a given level of performance, the field of smartphones, particularly entry-level products, is characterized by the search for minimum costs. The experience curve phenomenon (cost of a manufactured object decreases with the number of objects produced) applies perfectly, but the various manufacturers are looking for the lowest cost prices for their products. This is reflected in very high levels of functional integration, to minimize the number of components needed to make the product. This leads to the integration on the same chip of all the system's elements, apart from the high-frequency circuits and the power amplifiers in the antenna. This type of circuit is a complete system-on-a-chip (SoC), comprising digital (computing) and analog (audio/video/radio...