InfoPad - past, present and future

Abstract

The InfoPad project was a large interdisciplinary effort, which had a goal of implementing a complete system for wireless access of multimedia data from a high bandwidth wired infrastructure. The basic approach was to minimize the cost and energy consumption of the portable user device by using network based resources. A system approach was taken in this investigation, which attempted to optimize all aspects of the design from the user interface to the low power design of the terminal hardware, which uncovered a need to deal with the issues of project management and intergroup communications. From what was learned in this project a new effort is now underway investigating the present and future capabilities of implementing single chip wireless systems in advanced CMOS technology.