Mobile and personal communication systems form key market areas for the electronics industry of the nineties. Stringent requirements in terms of flexibility, performance and power dissipation, aredriving the development of integrated circuits into the direction of heterogeneous single-chip solutions. New IC architectures are emerging which contain the core of a powerful programmable processor, complemented with dedicated hardware, memory and interface structures. In this tutorial we will discuss the real-life design of a heterogeneous IC for an industrial telecom application: a reconfigurable mobile terminal for satellite communication. Based on this practical design experience, we will subsequently discuss a methodology for the design of heterogeneous ICs. Design steps that will be addressed include: system specification and refinement, data path and communication synthesis, and code generation for embedded processor cores
