An integrated circuit radio transceiver and method therefor includes primary transceiver operation circuitry. In addition to routine transceiver circuitry, the radio transceiver includes a service processor module operable to support redundant operations to facilitate any one of monitoring, test, device management and boot-up sequence functions of the primary transceiver operation circuitry. The service processor module generally has necessary access to hardware components and is operable to control, initialize and monitor the hardware components to assist in test and error recovery.