According to market analysts, the market for consumer electronics will
con- tinue to grow at a rate higher than that of electronic systems in
general. The consumer market can be characterized by rapidly growing
complexities of appli- cations and a rather short market window. As a
result, more and more complex designs have to be completed in shrinking
time frames. A key concept for coping with such stringent requirements
is re-use. Since the re-use of completely fixed large hardware blocks is
limited to subproblems of system-level applications (for example
MPEG-2), flexible, programmable pro- cessors are being used as building
blocks for more and more designs. Processors provide a unique
combination offeatures: they provide flexibility and re-use. The
processors used in consumer electronics are, however, in many cases dif-
ferent from those that are used for screen and keyboard-based equipment,
such as PCs. For the consumer market in particular, efficiency of the
product plays a dominating role. Hence, processor architectures for
these applications are usually highly-optimized and tailored towards a
certain application domain.