A Scalable MIMO Detector Processor With Near-ASIC Energy Efficiency

Emerging 4G wireless communication systems need to deliver much higher data rates, more flexibility, and a significantly higher energy efficiency than current systems. To cope with this immense increase of requirements, new design approaches are a necessity. This paper focuses on the design of an advanced multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) detector, which is typically a bottleneck in the wireless receiver. In the proposed template-based design approach innovative architecture concepts, such as very wide register and distributed loop buffer, and algorithm-architecture co-optimizations are combined. The resulting MIMO detector processor, which is scalable to eight and more antennas, achieves a high area efficiency of 571 GOPS/mm² and a high energy efficiency of 3.3 GOPS/mW in the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) 40-nm technology. By exploiting the dynamically varying requirements, the proposal has the potential to achieve a higher average energy efficiency than an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) equivalent. However, a penalty in total area consumption exists. The proposed architecture style offers an interesting and a very promising tradeoff in between the traditional ASIC and the other programmable processor solutions.