Low Power Design on Algorithmic and Architectural Level: A Case Study of an HSDPA Baseband Digital Signal Processing System

The optimization of power consumption plays a key role in the design of a cellular system: Increasing data rates together with high mobility represent a constantly growing design challenge because advanced algorithms are required with a higher complexity, more chip area and increased power consumption which contrast with limited power supply. In this contribution, digital baseband components for a high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) system are optimized on algorithmic and architectural level. Three promising algorithms for the equalization of the propagation channel are compared regarding performance, complexity and power consumption using fixed-point SystemC models. On architectural level an adaptive control unit is introduced together with an output interference analyzer. The presented strategy reduces the arithmetic operations for convenient propagation conditions up to 70 % which relates to an estimated power reduction of up to 40 % while the overall performance is not affected