Software Defined Radio architecture using a multicasting Network-on-Chip

Software Defined Radio (SDR) allows dynamically changing protocols and functions in order to provide flexible, multiple-standard services to users. A reconfigurable baseband architecture having a set of coarse-grained, heterogeneous execution units is one strategy which can meet this requirement. However, while we can integrate a large number of execution units onto a chip, conventional bus structures may not be able to support the amount of traffic between the functional units due to the shared nature of the bus. In this paper, an SDR baseband platform is mapped onto two different types of on-chip networks, a multicasting CDMA-based network and a conventional 2D-mesh network. Synthesis is performed for both cases using a 0.13 micron CMOS technology library and comparative results for performance and area are provided.