Personal appliance system and ASIC architecture

Summary form only given as follows. A case analysis of four different solutions for Personal Communicators/PDAs is presented in tutorial form. The tutorial also addresses the design considerations for low-cost communication centric compute devices and technology trends which will shape the future of this new class of device. A look at the system requirements which are envisioned For this new class of device is presented to set the expectations for the products. The first generation solutions developed by various companies or under company alliances are then inspected. Several systems are compared looking at the functionality, inferred design trade-off made in the partitioning and design of the chip sets upon which they are based. Special consideration will be payed to the power, UI I/O and communication sub-systems. The announced systems which will be included In the tutorial are: the AT&T/Eo Hobbit based EO440 and the Apple ARM based Newton 110; the soon to be announced Motorola Dragon based Envoy. The announced chipsets provided by AMD and Cirrus Logic are included although no systems have been announced making use of these devices. Lastly, we will gaze into the future and look at where system integration will take future products