A total cost approach to evaluating different reconfigurable architectures for baseband processing in wireless receivers

There is growing interest in the use of flexible digital signal processors for wireless systems, driven by the demands of time to market, cost pressure, the requirement for flexibility to cope with evolving standards, and rapidly increasing processing needs. Much of the discussion of these techniques involves terms like "efficient" or "cost-effective" without necessarily quantifying the terms. This article considers the various architectures applicable to a wideband CDMA node-B base station (ASIC, FPGA, traditional DSP, and two varieties of flexible DSP) and builds a quantitative total cost approach to evaluating them, including benchmarked performance data.