Optimizations for an efficient reconfiguration of an ASIP-based turbo decoder

The multiplication of wireless standards is introducing the need of flexible multi-standard baseband receivers. A multi-ASIP approach for turbo decoding is an answer to reach high throughput and high flexibility. The increasing demand of throughput for new greedy application on mobile devices and the reduction of latency between two frames create the need of an efficient reconfiguration management of such multi-ASIP platforms. In this paper, we propose to tackle reconfiguration optimization of a multi-standard ASIP for turbo decoding developed during previous work. Results show that for an area overhead of 0.012 mm² in 65 nm CMOS technology, a significant reconfiguration time optimization is achieved thanks to a reduction of the ASIP configuration load of 70%. Moreover, in a multi-ASIP context in which 8 ASIPs are implemented the configuration load is divided by ten thanks to the possibility to use a multicast mechanism for ASIP configuration loading.