Case Study on a Software Communications Architecture Component for Hardware Acceleration

In this paper we introduce an architecture for hardware acceleration of Software Communication Architecture (SCA) components. Intercommunication, as well as responsiveness and power dissipation, is essential for the components of SCA. Thus, we studied the SCA to explore the hotspot function and optimize its overall performance to not only operate efficiently but also in an energy-efficient way. We spotted the amplifier function takes a significant amount of the execution time which involves single-precision floating-point computation. A case study on the implementation of the amplifier component on the Virtex5 Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform is presented. Consequently, we make a comparison of the hardware accelerated amplifier implementation employing a floating-point unit (FPU) engine over pure software implementation with no FPU support. We obtained a speedup of up to 2x faster while minimizing the energy consumption by up to 100% with a power consumption increase of 0.68%, achieving our goal.