A Configurable Parallel Processor for Third

The third generation (3G) proposal for cellular communications claims to provide global roaming, high transfer rates and advanced services such as: commerce, global positioning system and multimedia messaging services via audio and video. In the framework of these complex networks several important computational processes are performed; not only do these operations require high performance solutions, but they must be accomplished within strict constraints regarding power consumption, size and cost. This paper discusses two important processes occurring in Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) networks, namely encryption and MPEG-4 video encoding; and proposes a hardware solution, in the form of a configurable Very Large Instruction Word (VLIW) parallel processor, to improve the performance of those processes