According to market analysts, the market for consumer electronics will con­ tinue to grow at a rate higher than that of electronic systems in general. The consumer market can be characterized by rapidly growing complexities of appli­ cations and a rather short market window. As a result, more and more complex designs have to be completed in shrinking time frames. A key concept for coping with such stringent requirements is re-use. Since the re-use of completely fixed large hardware blocks is limited to subproblems of system- level applications (for example MPEG-2), flexible, programmable pro­ cessors are being used as building blocks for more and more designs.