Market and technology drivers for cellular infrastructure modem development

Cellular Infrastructure seems to be a fertile ground for new and sometimes not so new architectural ideas. Start ups as well as mature companies propose variants on software defined radio, reconfigurable architectures and dedicated chip sets. However the bulk of modems today have remained a combination of digital signal processors and ASICs. The demise of the DSP has been predicted many times over the last decade and yet it remains a strong part of cellular infrastructure. So what changes are really happening? In this paper we take a methodical approach to this question by first identifying the forces that are driving the industry today, and then deducing the architecture evolution implied by these forces. We discover that software defined radio and reconfigurability do indeed play a role but perhaps not in the way many suspect.