Read the Electronics Weekly guide to theInternational 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.