Mobile Multimedia Systems

Recent advances in wireless networking technology and the exponential development of semiconductor technology have engendered a new paradigm of computing, called personal mobile computing. In this paradigm, the basic personal computing and communication device will be an integrated, battery-operated device, small enough to carry with you all the time. This device will be used as a replacement of many items the modern human-being carries around. However, the technological challenges to establishing this paradigm are non-trivial. In particular, these devices have limited battery resources, will handle diverse data types, and will operate in environments that are insecure, time varying, and unplanned. As the mobiles must remain usable in a wide variety of environments, they must be flexible enough to accommodate a variety of multimedia services and communication capabilities and adapt to various operating conditions in an (energy) efficient way. The opportunities given by the continuous miniaturisation of micro-electronics are employed in the architecture of the Mobile Digital Companion to solve some of the problems that mobile multimedia computers encounter. We have shown that it is not sufficient to simply continue advancing our chip architectures and technologies as just more of the same: building microprocessors and devices that are simply more complicated versions of the kind built today