A Rapid Methodology for Multi-mode Communication Circuit Generation

The need to integrate multiple wireless communication protocols into a single low-cost, low power hardware platform is prompted by the increasing number of emerging communication protocols and applications. This paper presents an efficient methodology for integrating multiple wireless protocols in an ASIC which minimizes resource occupation. A hierarchical data path merging algorithm is developed to find common shareable components in two different communication circuits. The data path merging approach will build a combined generic circuit with inserted multiplexers (MUXes) which can provide the same functionality of each individual circuit. The proposed method is orders of magnitude faster (well over 1000 times faster for realistic circuits) than the existing data path merging algorithm (with an overhead of 3% additional area) and can switch communication protocols on the fly (i.e. it can switch between protocols in a single clock cycle), which is a desirable feature for seemingly simultaneous multi-mode wireless communication. Wireless LAN (WLAN) 802.11a, WLAN802.11b and Ultra Wide Band (UWB) transmission circuits are merged to prove the efficacy of our proposal.