1 During the last 30 years, wireless in communications has grown from a niche market to an economically vital consumer mass market. The first wave, with the breakthrough of 2G mobile telephony focused on speech, placed wireless communication in the consumer mass market. In the current second wave, services are extended toward true multimedia, including interactive video, audio, gaming, and broadband Internet. These high-data rate services, however, led to a separate IP-centric family of wireless personal (WPANs) and local area networks (WLANs) outside the 2G/3G mobile path. Since diversity between data- and voice-centric solutions and the competition between standardized and proprietary approaches is today more blocking than enabling effective development of successful products, a third major wave is unavoidable: a consolidation of both worlds in portable devices with flexible multistandard communication capabilities enabled for quality-of-service- 2 aware multimedia services. At the same time, the dominance of wired desktop personal computers has been undermined by the appearance of numerous portable and smart devices: laptops, notebooks, personal digital assistants, and gaming devices. Since these devices target low-cost consumer markets or face wired competition, time to market is crucial, designed-in flexibility is important, l- power operation is a key asset, yet device cost shall be at a minimum. This book approaches this design tradeoff challenge from the perspective of the system architect. The system architect is concerned both in an efficient design process and in a competitive design result.weiterlesen