The result is an emerging — or more accurately, reemerging — computing marketplace in which everything is being redefined, from the largest servers that host the Internet to the smallest Web-enabled cell phones and wireless personal-computing devices. Not just the nature of the computing platform, but the underlying assumptions and choices of how to build, test, debug and support these new platforms are changing as well.

The one stable element in this chaotic environment is the nature of the new computing: connected and distributed. Where previously "personal" computing was done on the desktop, it is now being distributed among a number of separate small-footprint devices such as PDAs, handheld computers and the like, said Gene Frantz, principal fellow at Texas Instruments Inc. and business development manager for digital signal processing at the company's Semiconductor Group in Dallas. These systems are using the ubiquitous nature of the Internet, new TCP/IP based protocols and new networking mechanisms such as wireless LANs to achieve "peer-to-peer" computing relationships.

This turmoil is best illustrated by what is going on in advanced wireless and mobile-phone segments, on the one hand, and the transformations that are occurring in PDAs, handheld computers and other so-called "information appliances" on the other.

As wireless phones gain in capability and are faced with markets that are not growing as fast as they used to, Frantz said, vendors are morphing their devices into something entirely different. First they are adding the ability to access the Internet and World Wide Web, and then they are adding features traditionally associated with traditional PDAs and unconnected small-footprint personal-computing appliances.

And on their side, vendors of the information appliances are adding new connectivity options to their designs: first through the wired connection, then via the low bit rates of current wireless and next through higher-bandwidth wireless LANs.

Beyond that, in their fight for attention from the average, power and corporate users, both types of providers are adding multimedia and multimodal capabilities to their designs.

Indeed, the multimodal, multimedia PDA's convergence with the wireless platform is the one bright spot this year in a market still beset by the weak global economy, said Cindy Wolf, Internet access devices market analyst at Instat/MDR. She expects PDAs to have a healthy 18.3 percent compound annual growth rate between 2002 and 2007, with the highest growth anticipated this year. "Future growth will rely on convincing consumers that PDAs can be more than just PC peripherals," Wolf said.

At all levels, said Wolf, systems are clearly moving beyond the basic applications of personal information devices, with a significant increase in multimedia functionality expected this year. In addition, the move toward full Internet access and wireless connectivity is on the rise. About 15 percent of PDAs offered this functionality in 2002, she said, but the number is expected to grow to 75 percent by 2007. On the wireless side, said Wolf, PDA users, at the high end especially, will have a choice of 802.11 and Bluetooth WLAN connectivity.

The emergence of this converged platform is having a domino effect down the line, said Robert Swanson, vice president of marketing at Alphamosaic Ltd. (Cambridge, England), touching everything from process and logic to microprocessor architecture and instruction set. To deliver video at 30 frames/second, said Swanson, the multimedia operating power of PDA and phone displays must be "one-twentieth to one hundredth of what they are currently." That kind of challenge "must be dealt with at the very basic levels of the silicon," he said.

Meanwhile, operating system vendors are finding they have to entirely rework their offerings, said Bill Weinberg, director of marketing at MontaVista Software Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.). Vendors of embedded real-time OSes are finding that their designs are being stretched in terms of new features and capabilities. And vendors of desktop OSes, Weinberg said, are finding that the strategies that once worked are less attractive in the small-footprint personal-computing and communications devices. "Not only are the real-time requirements of embedded control forcing them to upgrade their capabilities," he said, "but the challenges of these new converged platforms is making them further reassess their initial assumptions."

Suppliers of standard CPUs are also having to adapt, adding features, instructions and on-chip peripherals to handle a new range of capabilities never required in either the embedded or desktop world. Moreover, users want the same performance they had in their desktops, at lower power and in smaller and smaller footprints, said Anthony (Ton) Kampen, business development manager for the mobile communications business unit at Philips Electronics (Zurich, Switzerland). "What that means for providers of standard CPU architectures is that we must come up with ways to provide application-specific architectures without giving up the advantages of standard platforms," Kampen said.

This phenomenon has led Philips to develop a number of flexible system-on-chip platforms, said Chris Day, senior marketing director of multimedia platforms at Philips Semiconductors (Mountain View, Calif.). One is based on the company's own Trimedia VLIW architecture and another is built around its implementation of the ARM core.

Day described both as highly modular and configurable to a number of different consumer, wireless and personal-computing device applications. Within the Philips organization worldwide, he said, this thrust is supported by a common, integrated hardware/software platform that allows divisions and groups companywide to take advantage of software and hardware enhancements .

At Nokia Inc., a great deal of effort has gone into the Series 60 platform software-development kit, said William Plummer, vice president of the strategic-technology office in Dallas. It serves as the underpinning for most of Nokia's many wireless offerings, he said, from simple wireless cell phones and camera phones to phone/PDA Internet access devices and various game combinations, and from the lowest cost to the most feature rich.

The platform has been adopted by about half a dozen CPU vendors targeting the wireless/PDA markets, he said, adding that Nokia was very deliberate in its efforts to come up with a standards-based solution that made no assumptions about the nature of the products that would emerge in the market segment.

"There are just too many variables in the still very fluid computing and communications space to make firm extrapolations," said Plummer. "While there are differences in devices relating to price and the needs of different segments, there is still enough uncertainty about the nature of the ultimate environment to keep all options open."

According to TI's Frantz, all companies seeking a significant portion of the market for this still-evolving converged platform have to accept the fact that the underlying nature of the connected computing environment is in a state of flux. "In such an environment, your assumptions about what is driving a market segment might have to change on a dime," he said. "For example, the improvements in bandwidth in WLAN technology seem to be driving much of the move toward converged PDA/cell phone combos and a variety of multimedia configurations: game/cell, game/cell/PDA, PDA/wireless/Internet connectivity and so on."

But what would happen, asks Frantz, if there were some truly revolutionary advances in wireless bandwidth, reliability and always-on capabilities — enough to match wired connections? "It is very conceivable that under such conditions, this move toward converged all-in-one wireless/PDA/multimedia Internet-centric platforms could reverse itself," he said. "With sufficiently high and reliable connections, maybe some sets of functions could be better served, and would be more upgradable, if they were performed by a group of wirelessly connected devices working together in direct peer-to-peer form, adapting, adding and subtracting peers as the environment in which the computing or communications is done changes."

Fortunately, said Frantz, the underlying work on interoperable standards within the computer and communications industries will be useful in such cases, as will the efforts of companies such as TI, Motorola, Philips, Nokia and others to create flexible hardware/software platforms. "I feel certain that the mechanisms we've built in to adjust to changes along a particular path of development will be equally useful in allowing us to adjust laterally to sudden right turns in market direction," he said. "This is much different than in previous decades, where you had to be reasonably certain of the market's direction before committing resources." Now, said Frantz, companies have the underlying mechanisms by which to not only adjust to sudden market swings, but to actually support multiple, parallel product efforts, making use of the same underlying software and hardware resources.