Peter Clarke, Electronics360
August 25, 2014
Internet giant Google has started a design effort with Chinese fabless chip company Rockchip to develop an application processor for the Project Ara modular mobile phone, according to a posting within the Google+ interest group section for Google's Advanced Technology and Projects.
Project Ara is the codename given by Google to a project to develop a customizable handset in which hardware can be swapped in and out, like Lego blocks. In this way users will be able to select the peripheral set, the camera, amount of RAM, battery size and so on and plug together a custom smartphone based on a universal development board. While the idea of customizable consumer smartphone is unlikely to compete in efficiency or optimization with products developed by IDMs and white box companies ,it could provide a cost efficient way of developing mobile systems for industrial, robotics, medical and automotive applications.