In the beginning of the new century, many information appliance (IA) products will replace traditional electronic appliances to help people in smart, efficient, and low-cost ways. These successful products must be capable of communicating multimedia information, which is embedded into the electronic appliances with high integration, innovation, and power-throughput tradeoff. In this paper, we develop a codesign procedure to analyze, compare, and emulate the multimedia communication applications to find the candidate implementations under different criteria. The experimental results demonstrate that in general, memory technology dominates the optimal tradeoff and ALU improvements impact greatly on particular applications. The results also show that the proposed procedure is effective and quite efficient.