Staying ahead of the game in silicon for digital mobile communications

While the mobile communication electronics industry´s appetite grows for ever more functions and ever higher levels of integration, the complexity of these large designs is creating a discontinuity in the method by which these systems are designed. We take a close look at what is causing the design discontinuity, and how new design technologies are used to design advanced digital communications systems for portable and wireless communication applications. We examine how system-level design tools closely tied to silicon design implementation and verification technologies are enabling the creation of digital communications ICs in record time. We take several examples of commercially available silicon solutions designed using these methodologies-a G.721 ADPCM speech codec for cordless telephony and a complete variable-rate digital-video broadcast receiver for the DVB-S broadcast standard