How to simplify the design flow for wireless high speed interfaces

Today, portable devices gain in importance rapidly in daily live and industry. Therefore, Computing and communication converge ever more strongly. Especially the symbiosis of computing and communication places however the design engineers before always new challenges. On the one hand applications require i.e. more functionality, longer operation time, smaller form factor, robustness and reliability. Therefore, computing capacity and performance as well as packaging density will be increased drastically. On the other hand design engineers have to integrate powerful communication interfaces for uncompromising high speed data transfer. Wireless communication is the centre of attention thereby. But how will the implementation be realised, without injuring system specification, without increasing time and costs for development as well as for acquiring specialised knowledge and placing the new product at the right time on the market? This article focuses on progressive strategies for the implementation of powerful communication interfaces to accelerate and to simplify the design flow of portable devices. These strategies base on fully configurable and reusable protocol stack IPs. So the design engineers have the possibility to adapt the protocol stack IP by the use of an automatic configuration utility. Adaptable characteristics are i.e. data rate, functionality, flexibility, hardware/software partitioning and power consumption. Exemplarily these strategies are shown at the IPMS_IRHSP, a new high speed 16 Mbit/s IrDA protocol stack, which is a favourite under the wireless protocol stacks for near field communication.