The requirements of the rapidly expanding second and third generation mobile communication systems place increasing demands on DSP algorithms and their implementations. This paper presents a survey of the implications of the new cellular system technology on the DSP functionality and implementation of 1V DSP processors for mobile systems. Modern cellular phones are placing increasingly stringent demands on battery life and, therefore, on the power dissipation of the embedded DSP circuitry. At the same time, greater computational throughput is being required of the DSP, for example to implement more sophisticated speech and channel coding algorithms. Earlier low power DSPs have been reported. How ever, further improvements in power and performance are required. As is well known, the demand for wireless communications has been steadily increasing in recent years and the number of subscribers in wireless systems is expected to grow also in the future.