System design of a multimedia I/O terminal

A key to the success of future Personal Communications Systems is going to be the end-user devices or terminals that will allow users to have untethered access to fixed multimedia information servers. The authors address the key issues behind the design of a multimedia I/O terminal currently being implemented. The portability requirement places severe constraints on the power consumption requiring a system level approach to power reduction. This included partitioning of computation and optimizing algorithms, architectures, circuit styles and technology. In addition to reducing the power consumption and meeting bandwidth requirements, portable operation imposes additional challenges on the system design in order to deal with high bit error rates of wireless communications