Mapping future generation mobile telecommunication applications on a dynamically reconfigurable arcidtecture

In addition to the high performance requirements inherent to multimedia processings or to W -CDMA, future generation mobile telecommunications bring new constraints to the semiconductor design world. In fact, the traditional solutions based on the use of hardware devices (ASIC) or software ones (DSP) are unable to associate the flexibility and the high level of performance to the low energy consumption required by this application domain. In this paper, we study the efficiency of an architecture based on the use of the functional reconfiguration for such systems. Thanks to the implementation of key applications of UMTS, we will show that reconfigurable architectures can offer new compromises to associate high performances and low energy consumption in a flexible architecture and so, can be the solution to the set of problems associated with the future generation mobiles telecommunications systems.