Next Generation Architectures for 4G Communications

People have been talking about 4G systems emerging in 2010 for many years. However, to deploy these systems in 2010, we should already know with high confidence the 4G signal processing and SoC architectures for 4G handsets. It realistically takes two years to develop a power-efficient, cost competitive system-on-a-chip (SoC) for a volume market. There are standards to be completed, field trials, and wide scale acceptance before a system solution becomes viable. The entire cycle is at least five years. This talk provides some historical perspectives on architectures and systems evolution with the goal of providing an optimistic view that 4G is very near.