SODA: A Low-power Architecture For Software Radio

The physical layer of most wireless protocols is traditionally implemented in custom hardware to satisfy the heavy computational requirements while keeping power consumption to a minimum. These implementations are time consuming to design and difficult to verify. A programmable hardware platform capable of supporting software implementations of the physical layer, or software defined radio, has a number of advantages. These include support for multiple protocols, faster time-to-market, higher chip volumes, and support for late implementation changes. The challenge is to achieve this without sacrificing power. In this paper, we present a design study for a fully programmable architecture, SODA, that supports software defined radio — a high-end signal processing application. Our design achieves high performance, energy efficiency, and programmability through a combination of features that include single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) parallelism, and hardware optimized for 16bit ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Yuan Lin, Hyunseok Lee, Mark Woh, Yoav Harel, Scott A. Mahlke, Trevor N. Mudge, Chaitali Chakrabarti, Krisztián Flautner
• Keywords: Hardware, ISCA 2006, Physical Layer, Programmable Hardware Platform, Software Defined Radio