Read the Electronics Weekly guide to the International Solid State Circuits Conference.

Dr Anders Nilsson and Professor Dake Liu of the Linköping University in Sweden outlined a programmable baseband processor for mobile WiMAX and DVB-T/H at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco this week.

"We were able to implement a fully programmable baseband processor in less than 11mm2 in a 0.12µm CMOS process and achieve 70mW at 70MHz at the highest data rate of 31.67Mbit/s in DVB-T/H," said Liu. "In a commercial environment, with power management sub-systems added, we have used this architecture to significantly improve the power consumption."

Liu and Nilsson are co-founders of Coresonic, the firm which will exploit the processor.

The core has a SIMT (single instruction stream multiple tasks) architecture. "This exploits the characteristics of baseband algorithms to reduce the control overhead and improve the memory utilisation compared to VLIW/SIMD-based baseband processors," claimed Liu. "The key idea is to issue only one instruction each clock cycle but still allow several operations to execute in parallel as vector instructions may run for several clock cycles on the SIMD units."

LeoCore from Coresonic is based on this architecture, and uses vector instructions that operate on large data-sets in SIMD execution units. "Using this technique, memory efficiency is high and an entire DVB-T/H implementation fits within the program memory of 2kwords," said Coresonic.

Programmability enables hardware reuse between different radio standards and between different parts of the processing flow.