Statically-scheduled application-specific processor design: A case-study on MMSE MIMO equalization

Many application-specific processor design approaches are being proposed and investigated nowadays. All of them aim to cope with the emerging flexibility requirement combined with the best performance efficiency. Application Specific Instruction-set Processor (ASIP) design approach is among the most explored, and thus in many application domains. However, this concept implies a dynamic scheduling of a set of instructions which generally lead to an overhead related to instruction decoding. To reduce this overhead, other approaches were proposed using static scheduling of datapath control signals. In this paper, we explore this last approach and illustrate its benefits through a design case-study on MMSE MIMO equalization. The proposed design has common main architectural choices as a state-of-the-art ASIP for comparison purpose. The obtained results illustrate a significant improvement in execution time while using identical computational resources and supporting same flexibility parameters.