Abstract On development of mobile communication terminals, a trade-off among performance, development period, and implementation flexibility is one of the most important issues. In this paper, an efficient architecture of channel codec is explored, dedicatedly for W-CDMA mobile communication standard. A pair of configurable processors are employed in our implementation, which are assigned to Turbo decoding and remaining processes. A set of specific instructions are introduced to both of the processors so as to enhance the execution of computationally intensive functions, which successfully reduce the execution cycles by 98% and 60%, respectively. As a result, real-time processing can be achieved in short development period, demonstrating that our implementation is feasible solution against the trade-off.