Components for hand-held multimedia devices

Connectivity with different infrastructures implies the use of many media, far more than the amount required to communicate with man. When we restrict ourselves to hand-held devices, this number reduces due to the need for wireless communication. The majority of hand-held devices only have a single channel to provide connectivity with the network. The number of hand-held terminals has grown dramatically, with devices like pagers, mobile phones, DECT phones, palmtop and hand-held PCs, portable CD players and television. All this should be integrated into a single device, a personal companion, which provides all the functions carried out by the above-mentioned devices. To integrate these functions in a single device is a major challenge, most prominently from the power dissipation and functional composition point of view. In the digital era, re-use and resource sharing are now possible. A strong move towards programmable solutions exists, but there is a downside to this approach: performance requirements lead to the addition of extra processors or co-processing hardware and extra power dissipation. Additionally, providing too much flexibility leads to excessive system verification time. Therefore, I don´t believe in a software-biased approach, which leads to silicon solutions with CPUs and DSPs on a single chip. Heterogeneous multiprocessor architectures, covering the range from dedicated hardware to CPUs, is the playing field to keep functional composition, power and verification effort under control. Specification is the key to success for chips in multimedia hand-held terminals