Smartphone hardware is the set of chips inside a phone. One main chip computes and connects to the mobile network. Smaller chips handle the radio signal, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the touch screen. Memory chips hold everything the phone is working on and everything it keeps. A chip is a small, flat piece of silicon that carries billions of transistors, microscopic electrical switches. Most phones sold in India are now assembled in India, in factories in Noida, Chennai and Bengaluru. But almost all of their chips are made abroad, mostly in Taiwan and South Korea.
Consider a pharmacist in Lucknow, with a phone that was assembled in Noida. Here is what her phone's chips do in the first minute of her morning.
First, the phone itself was designed around bought-in parts. A phone brand chose the main chip, the memory, the screen and the cameras, and designed the circuit board and the case around them. It also adapted the software so that all these parts work together. This work is smartphone design.
Second, she picks up the phone. Overnight, her smart ring measured her pulse and her movement while she slept. Now the ring sends the night's readings to the phone over Bluetooth. The phone's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip receives them.
Third, she taps the ring's health app. Under the glass, a touch controller senses exactly where her finger is. A display driver chip then lights each pixel of the app's screen. Some new devices have no screen at all. With an AI hardware device, such as a pin clipped to clothing, the user asks an AI model questions aloud instead of tapping.
Fourth, the main chip runs the app. This chip is the system-on-chip (SoC): one chip that holds the processor, the graphics engine, an AI engine and the modem. It works on the night's readings in DRAM, the "8 GB RAM" printed on the phone's box. DRAM is fast, but it loses everything when the power goes off. So the app and her past months of readings are kept in flash memory, the "128 GB storage", which keeps data without power.
Fifth, the app uploads the night's summary to the ring maker's servers, over the mobile network. The cellular modem inside the SoC turns the data into a radio signal that follows the 5G rules. The RF front end, the chips between the antenna and the modem, strengthens the signal and sends it to the nearest tower. There, a radio unit receives it.
Most of these chips come from fabless companies, which design chips but do not make them. Many of them do the design work in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. When a phone brand chooses a company's chip for a new phone, the chip company calls it a design win. Every chip in the phone also runs its own small program, called firmware. The ring, the phone app and the maker's servers together form the three layers described on IoT architecture.