Data transfer and storage exploration for real-time implementation of a digital audio broadcast receiver on a Trimedia processor

The implementation of advanced channel receivers using low-end, though specialised instruction set, media processors is very attractive because of design productivity and cost efficiency reasons. However, achieving real-time using these platforms is not a trivial task. In this paper, we illustrate the application of our data transfer and storage exploration methodology for the implementation of a digital audio broadcast (DAB) channel receiver in real-time using a low-end Trimedia TM1000 processor. We show how the platform independent data transfer and storage related bottlenecks are first eliminated, so in a second phase, the resulting application source code can be transformed to optimally exploit the available memory hierarchy while efficiently using the sub-word-level acceleration capabilities provided by Trimedia´s instruction set architecture. These optimisations have brought sufficient speed-up improvements so as to allow real-time execution of the decoder, obtaining about a factor 8 speed-up when compared to a reference functional implementation of the DAB standard.