Articles

The recent development of Mobile System-on-Chip (SoC) has completely changed the functionality of the contemporary smartphones, wearables, and IoT devices through enhanced computational strength but with stringent power and heat constraints. Mobile applications are becoming more complex (e.g., real-time computer vision, high-resolution imaging, on-device artificial intelligence, etc.) and SoCs have to provide high throughput, good work load distribution, and responsive multitasking without sacrificing battery life. To overcome these issues, modern SoCs are based on heterogeneous multicore designs, with big. LITTLE designs, special purpose accelerators, like NPUs and ISPs, and memory arranged hierarchies and backed with high bandwidth buses. Also, more sophisticated power-management approaches like Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), clock gating, and power gating provide fine-tuning energy management in the active and idle conditions. Most recently, scheduling and thermal sensitivity resource allocation using AI has become a promising approach in increasing real-time refinement and flexibility. This paper gives a detailed discussion of performance-driven and power-efficient design methods in mobile SoCs, including architectural innovations, workload optimization, and built-in AI-assisted energy management. The discussion identifies major research trends, system-level developments, and new challenges defining next-generation mobile computing systems.