Convergence of Communication, Infotainment, and Multimedia Applications Require Paradigm Shift in Processor Development and Reuse Pattern

Abstract

Mobile devices of today have been steadily attracting applications far beyond the realm of voice communication. The market penetration rate of mobile devices has defied all predictions and is projected to remain strong for many years to come (more than 3/4th of the world population still need to be connected). Current and future market trend makes it extremely attractive for complimentary applications and features porting to serve the promising demand (on average mobile users change their mobile device once a year) and huge return on investment (a matter of simple software upgrade). The integration of camera, position location, gaming, audio, and video applications in today's high-end mobile phones supports this fact to a large extent. Other features such as audio/video streaming, digital TV, and personalized content delivery are being considered as the standard feature of the next generation mobile communications devices.

New features and enhancements fetch much needed revenue stream and prop up applications integration as add-on to primarily voice-centric devices. This add-on scheme in isolation yields a mediocre solution with respect to power and processing efficiency. The additional power consumption reduces talk/idle time substantially and increased processing requirements add to size (processing elements/gates) and consequently reduces talk/idle time as well. In addition it does not scale well and lacks extensibility. This paper presents a framework for developing object oriented processing framework, which exploits the commonality across multi domain functions by leveraging principles of abstraction, instantiation, and overloading – kind of bringing object oriented programming to hardware level.