A novel design technology for next generation ubiquitous computing architectures

Modem applications for mobile computing require high performance architectures. On the other hand, there are restrictions such as storage or power consumption. The use of reconfigurable logic allows to design low power yet potent architectures. Storage restrictions of small devices can be solved by using external servers to store and manage data. We have developed and tested a novel versatile digital architecture (VDA) to design inexpensive, but very flexible devices for mobile ubiquitous computing. A single VDA compliant device can be used as a mobile phone, video player, database, etc. In contrast to state of the art architectures, our approach offers new key facilities such as application download on demand and on-the-fly update of hardware acceleration components. These updates can be controlled by an external server or by the client itself. Furthermore we are able to monitor any internal signal of hardware components remotely for error detection and performance optimization. Finally our architecture offers a powerful server side layer for management of hardware and software components and user data.