Broadband wireless technologies have the potential to provide integrated data and multimedia services in several niche areas. The rapid emergence of many new protocols in this area has created a growing need to develop high performance communication systems that can satisfy high-end data processing requirements inherent in these technologies within ever decreasing time to market windows. A methodology used to develop a configurable platform for embedded communication system designs is discussed here. One of the applications for the architecture requires that the device interact with a variety of components that may communicate using variety of different protocols. Varying geographic deployment of the device may also require dynamic adjustment of the operating behavior of the system hardware. Thus the architecture is built with the ability to be rapidly reconfigured in order to optimize its functionality and performance.