ABSTRACT
Most users of cellular telephones don’t stop to consider the enormous amount of effort that has gone into designing an otherwise mundane object. Lurking beneath the display, below the user’s background picture of his little boy holding a balloon, lies a board containing circuits and wires, algorithms that took decades to refine and implement, and software to make it all work seamlessly together. What exactly is happening in those circuits? How do such things actually work? Consider a modern tablet, considered a fictitious device only years ago, that displays live television, plays videos, provides satellite navigation, makes international Skype calls, acts as a personal computer, and contains just about every interface known to man (e.g., USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet), as shown in Figure 1.1. Gigabytes of data arrive to be viewed, processed, or saved, and given the size of these hand-held devices, the burden of efficiency falls to the designers of the components that lie within them.
