A reconfigurable multi-standard ASIP-based turbo decoder for an efficient dynamic reconfiguration in a multi-ASIP context

The emergence of many wireless standards is introducing the need of flexible multi-standard baseband receivers. To address this issue and to face the increasing demand of higher throughput for new greedy applications on mobile devices recent works propose multi-ASIP platforms for decoding algorithms. Furthermore dynamic evolution of communication parameters combined with the reduction of latency between two data frames imposes the need for an efficient reconfiguration management of such systems. In this context, we propose to tackle reconfiguration optimizations of a multi-standard and multi-mode ASIP for turbo decoding in order to improve the global reconfiguration management of a multi-ASIP platform. A comprehensive analysis concerning the area impact and dynamic reconfiguration performance is presented. Proposed ASIP configuration optimizations lead to a low area overhead of 0.004 mm² in 65 nm CMOS technology. For a multi-ASIP platform in which 8 ASIPs are implemented on a same device the configuration load is divided by ten thanks to both ASIP optimizations and an efficient configuration infrastructure.