3G Handset and Network Design

Software footprint and software functionality is a product of memory bandwidth (code and application storage space), processor bandwidth (the speed at which instructions can be processed), and code bandwidth (number of lines of code). Over the past three generations of cellular phone, memory bandwidth has increased from a few kilobytes to a few Megabytes to a few Gigabytes. Processor bandwidth has increased from 10 MIPS (millions of instructions per second) to 100 MIPS to 1000 MIPS, and code bandwidth has increased from 10,000 to 100,000 to 1,000,000 lines of code (using the Star- Core SC140 as a recent example).