Simulation and rapid prototyping of flexible systems-on-a-chip for future mobile communication applications

The way to future broadband access techniques into mobile communication systems introduces new and flexible radio network architectures with difficult and interesting challenges. The corresponding technical developments have to solve a new set of problems that stem from access mechanisms, power consumption, error rate, transmission speed and bandwidth characteristics of the wireless links, mobility aspects, etc. This paper presents the major challenges for the interdisciplinary realization of flexible microelectronic system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions for the efficient implementation of future mobile communication applications. The focus of the paper is the introduction of a combined simulation and real-time prototyping approach for the flexible SoCs that are needed for digital baseband processing in future mobile radio devices. Therefore, a new dynamically reconfigurable hardware architecture tailored to this application area is exploited for prototyping and for giving implementation perspectives