A programmable DSP architecture for wireless communication systems

Programmable solutions for fast mobile communication systems are attracting ever-growing attention due to different and also evolving communication standards. They overcome the shortcomings of ASIC design, by allowing multimode operation, and general-purpose processors by exploiting the inherent data level parallelism in the application. MaRS, a macro-pipelined reconfigurable system, is a domain specific programmable parallel DSP architecture, aimed at harnessing the inherent parallelism in such applications. In this paper, we present the MaRS architecture along with the latest modifications and algorithms that are mapped onto it. We have mapped an IEEE 802.11a WLAN transmitter including a parallel FFT and soft decision Viterbi decoder on MaRS. Our simulation results show that the performance achieved on MaRS meets the stringent timing constraints of the IEEE 802.11a baseband transceiver at its highest rate, with 20% slack, leaving a playground for system level power optimization. Finally, we have mapped the EEMBC telecom suite on MaRS to evaluate and compare our architecture with existing architectures.