Modern embedded systems must execute a variety of high performance real-time tasks, such as audio and image compression and decompression, channel coding and encoding, etc. Reconfigurable platforms can effectively be used in these cases, because they allow to re-use the architecture for as many applications as possible.

This paper describes the implementation of a UMTS turbo-decoder on one such platform, the XiRisc reconfigurable processor. Our goal is to test the development framework and design flow that we already developed on a real industrial example. Our results shows that, with some manual effort from the designer, very good performance improvements can be achieved, using a flow close to embedded software development.