ABSTRACT
Green communications can only be as efficient as the underlying technology used to implement protocols and algorithms. Over the past 50 years, advances in Integrated Circuit fabrication technology have provided system designers with unprecedented amounts of computing power. This has led to dramatic changes in feature sets of mobile devices along with the infrastructure required to support this new “mobile world”. The exponential growth in semiconductor technology, however, has led to a new problem: the cost of designing, verifying, and fabricating an integrated circuit has become so prohibitive, that today, very few enterprises are capable of creating state-of-the-art chips. This has led many designers to employ standard parts such as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to leverage advanced process technologies without the cost and risk of designing a custom integrated circuit. FPGAs are pre-designed substrates which can be configured, in seconds, to implement any digital circuit. By amortizing the fabrication cost over all FPGA users, these devices essentially provide large-scale integration without requiring access to a stateof-the-art chip fabrication plant.
