802.11a transmitter: a case study in microarchitectural exploration

Hand-held devices have rigid constraints regarding power dissipation and energy consumption. Whether a new functionality can be supported often depends upon its power requirements. Concerns about the area (or cost) are generally addressed after a design can meet the performance and power requirements. Different micro-architectures have very different area, timing and power characteristics, and these need RTL-level models to be evaluated. In this paper we discuss the microarchitectural exploration of an 802.11a transmitter via synthesizable and highly-parameterized descriptions written in Bluespec SystemVerilog (BSV). We also briefly discuss why such architectural exploration would be practically infeasible without appropriate linguistic facilities. No knowledge of 802.11a or BSV is needed to read this paper