Requisite semiconductor advances for consumer digital radio equipment

Increasing demand for wireless communications services in countries where most frequencies are already allocated means that time must become a multiplexing parameter. Even though time division multiplexing equipment has been used for many years, there have been few instances where time has been used in consumer equipment and even fewer instances involving battery-powered consumer equipment. Digital radio equipment requires functions that can only be performed by digital signal processors or ASICs performing DSP functions. In some systems the processing power required to simultaneously perform the necessary functions with 'off-the-shelf' DSPs reaches well beyond 40 MIPS. With todays DSPs and the associated ROM and RAM, the power dissipation per MIP is usually in the 20-50 mW per MIP range. Thus possibly the most critical requisite for the widespread availability of wireless communications equipment is in dramatically reducing the power dissipation currently required for digital baseband functions. There are multiple approaches to this problem with the evolving component-level products consisting of various combinations of the low-power solutions.<
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