Stream-access-oriented baseband signal processors for SDR

This paper presents a baseband processor developed for SDR that supports such wireless modes as WLAN, WiMAX, W-CDMA, and LTE. To achieve both the high area-efficiency of dedicated hardware and the high flexibility of DSP, we have developed a hetero-multi-processor architecture that maps each processing task either to a newly developed stream-access-oriented processor or to a parameterized hardware engine. Our design achieves 3.8 times faster baseband processing than does conventional DSP, while still maintaining high flexibility and scalability for SDR. Further, our execution controller provides faster total processing time (23% faster in an LTE design) and more flexible multi-core execution control.