Scalable radio processor architecture for modern wireless communications

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an architecture of scalable radio processor targeting an OFDM based wireless modem. The architecture is based on the coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA), which provides programmable and flexible accelerators by reconfiguring hardware resources at run time. On the other hand, the architecture maximizes the data parallelism by implementing 32-way SEVTD operations. Other features considered in the current implementation include mini-core structure, dedicated vector memory, and simplified datapath. The proposed architecture is compared to the precedent 4×4 CGRA processor, and evaluated with several communication kernels in terms of cycle, area and power. The implementation result shows that the proposed architecture has 3.6 times better in cycle performance with 2 times better scheduling but with double area penalty, resulting in 1495 cycles for complex 2K-FFT, to the best of our knowledge, that is the best DSP cycles reported until today. The synthesized results with 32nm library also show that the proposed architecture is operational at 800MHz, which is capable of running maximum 128 GOPS of wireless applications.