Low-Power Correlation for IEEE 802.16 OFDM Synchronization on FPGA

This brief compares the use of multiplierless and DSP slice-based cross-correlation for IEEE 802.16d orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) timing synchronization on Xilinx Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The natural approach, given the availability of embedded DSP blocks on these FPGAs, would be to implement standard multiplier-based cross-correlation. However, this can consume a significant number of DSP blocks, which may not fit on low-power devices. Hence, we compare a DSP48E1 slice-based design to four different quantizations of multiplierless correlation in terms of resource utilization and power consumption. OFDM timing synchronization accuracy is evaluated for each system at different signal-to-noise ratios. Results show that even relatively coarse multiplierless coefficient quantization can yield accurate timing synchronization, and does so at high clock speeds. Multiplierless designs enjoy reduced power consumption over the DSP48E1 Slice-based design, and can be used where DSP Slice resources are insufficient, such as on low-power FPGA devices.