A low-power VLIW processor for 3GPP-LTE complex numbers processing

New generation of telecommunication applications requires highly efficient processing units to tackle with the increasing signal processing algorithmic complexity. They also need to be flexible for handling a large range of radio access technology with specifications moving very fast. As devices including telecommunication features are, per nature, mobile, the high level of flexibility must be achieved while preserving very low power consumption. In this paper, a high performance low-power application-specific processor is proposed for complex signal processing. Thanks to dedicated control architecture, this processor exhibits an average 81% utilization rate of its principal operator, a complex MAC for a 3GPP-LTE application. The main innovations are the use of a reconfigurable profile and instruction cache strategy to reduce power consumption. This leads to a 10× reduction of the control power consumption. As a result, an average 50 mW power consumption is measured after implementation in a low-power 65 nm technology while delivering 3.2 GOPS. Finally, a comparison with state-of-the-art low-power DSP shows at least 24 % gain.