Topics in integrated circuits for communications [Guest editorial]

The dream of being able to stay connected anywhere and at any time has finally come true with the advent of smartphones in late 2006. Since then smartphones have proliferated rapidly. In 2010, 300 million smartphones were shipped worldwide, up nearly 75 percent from 2009. Soon more than half of the communication systems on chips (SoCs) in the cellular market will be geared for smartphones. Aside from delivering high throughputs enabled by 3G/4G communication processing, such SoCs offer integrated support for myriad peripheral functions including Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, and FM radio. Moreover, these highly sophisticated SoCs will have computation power upwards of a few GHz hosting powerful operating systems that enable innovations and customizations essential to create feature rich multimedia services in a portable handheld device.