Carolyn N. Kinder
If you take a cell phone apart, you find that it contains just a few individual parts, such as, an antenna, a liquid crystal display (LCD), a keyboard, a microphone, a speaker, and a battery. Inside the phone there is a circuit board. The circuit board is the heart of the system. Your journey through the computer chips on the circuit board would consist of three rooms. First you would enter in room analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion chips which translate the outgoing audio signal from analog to digital and the incoming signal from digital back to analog. It can process millions of calculations per second in order to compress and decompress the voice stream. Then you would enter into the second room where the digital signal processor (DSP) is located. Here in this room you would soon discover that the DSP is a highly customized processor designed to perform signal manipulation calculations at high speed. Next, you would enter the third room with the microprocessor. The microprocessor handles all the main functions for the keyboard and display, deals with command and control signaling with the base station (cell tower) and also coordinates the rest of the functions on the board. The read only memory (ROM) and Flash memory chips provide storage for the phone's operating system and customizable features, such as the phone directory. The radio frequency (RF) and power section handles power management and recharging, and also deals with the hundreds of FM channel. Finally, the RF amplifiers handle signals traveling to and from the antenna.
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