Implementation of application-specific signal processor for high-speed communication systems

This paper describes the implementation of an application-specific DSP for OFDM communication systems. The proposed instructions can support computations of various blocks in OFDM systems. The data ALU is specially designed and optimized for the proposed instructions. Performance comparisons show that the number of clock cycles improves over 10% compared with Carmel DSP, over 50% compared with TMS320C62X for FFT computation and over 40%-80% for scrambling, convolutional encoding and interleaving, compared with these DSPs. However, the size of the DSP is much smaller than existing DSPs. The proposed architecture is implemented using the iPROVE FPGA board and verification is performed using assembly programs that implement most of the OFDM blocks.