A Mini-cell Architecture for Networked Multimedia Workstations

High speed networks and multimedia place significant demands on end-systems. The approach at Lancaster has been to develop multimedia enhancement units with high-speed network support for conventional workstations. This paper outlines how these enhancement units have developed from the early transputer based designs to hardware implementations. We argue that mini-cell based inter-device communication leads to efficient implementation of such enhancement units and detail two implementations based on this approach-the LANC and the MEND