Baseband analog front-end and digital back-end for reconfigurable multi-standard terminals

Multimedia applications are driving wireless network operators to add high-speed data services such as Edge (E-GPRS), WCDMA (UMTS) and WLAN (IEEE 802.11a,b,g) to the existing GSM network. This creates the need for multi-mode cellular handsets that support a wide range of communication standards, each with a different RF frequency, signal bandwidth, modulation scheme etc. This in turn generates several design challenges for the analog and digital building blocks of the physical layer. In addition to the above-mentioned protocols, mobile devices often include Bluetooth, GPS, FM-radio and TV services that can work concurrently with data and voice communication. Multi-mode, multi-band, and multi-standard mobile terminals must satisfy all these different requirements. Sharing and/or switching transceiver building blocks in these handsets is mandatory in order to extend battery life and/or reduce cost. Only adaptive circuits that are able to reconfigure themselves within the handover time can meet the design requirements of a single receiver or transmitter covering all the different standards while ensuring seamless inter-interoperability. This paper presents analog and digital base-band circuits that are able to support GSM (with Edge), WCDMA (UMTS), WLAN and Bluetooth using reconfigurable building blocks. The blocks can trade off power consumption for performance on the fly, depending on the standard to be supported and the required QoS (Quality of Service) leve

Low Power Processor Architectures and Contemporary Techniques for Power Optimization – A Review

The technological evolution has increased the number of transistors for a given die area significantly and increased the switching speed from few MHz to GHz range. Such inversely proportional decline in size and boost in performance consequently demands shrinking of supply voltage and effective power dissipation in chips with millions of transistors. This has triggered substantial amount of research in power reduction techniques into almost every aspect of the chip and particularly the processor cores contained in the chip. This paper presents an overview of techniques for achieving the power efficiency mainly at the processor core level but also visits related domains such as buses and memories. There are various processor parameters and features such as supply voltage, clock frequency, cache and pipelining which can be optimized to reduce the power consumption of the processor. This paper discusses various ways in which these parameters can be optimized. Also, emerging power efficient processor architectures are overviewed and research activities are discussed which should help reader identify how these factors in a processor contribute to power consumption. Some of these concepts have been already established whereas others are still active research areas. © 2009 ACADEMY PUBLISHER

Low-Power Embedded Design Solutions and Low-Latency On-Chip Interconnect Architecture for System-On-Chip Design

This dissertation presents three design solutions to support several key system-on-chip (SoC) issues to achieve low-power and high performance. These are: 1) joint source and channel decoding (JSCD) schemes for low-power SoCs used in portable multimedia systems, 2) efficient on-chip interconnect architecture for massive multimedia data streaming on multiprocessor SoCs (MPSoCs), and 3) data processing architecture for low-power SoCs in distributed sensor network (DSS) systems and its implementation. The first part includes a low-power embedded low density parity check code (LDPC) - H.264 joint decoding architecture to lower the baseband energy consumption of a channel decoder using joint source decoding and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). A low-power multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and H.264 video joint detector/decoder design that minimizes energy for portable, wireless embedded systems is also designed. In the second part, a link-level quality of service (QoS) scheme using unequal error protection (UEP) for low-power network-on-chip (NoC) and low latency on-chip network designs for MPSoCs is proposed. This part contains WaveSync, a low-latency focused network-on-chip architecture for globally-asynchronous locally-synchronous (GALS) designs and a simultaneous dual-path routing (SDPR) scheme utilizing path diversity present in typical mesh topology network-on-chips. SDPR is akin to having a higher link width but without the significant hardware overhead associated with simple bus width scaling. The last part shows data processing unit designs for embedded SoCs. We propose a data processing and control logic design for a new radiation detection sensor system generating data at or above Peta-bits-per-second level. Implementation results show that the intended clock rate is achieved within the power target of less than 200mW. We also present a digital signal processing (DSP) accelerator supporting configurable MAC, FFT, FIR, and 3-D cross product operations for embedded SoCs. It consumes 12.35mW along with 0.167mm2 area at 333MHz

KAVUAKA: a low-power application-specific processor architecture for digital hearing aids

The power consumption of digital hearing aids is very restricted due to their small physical size and the available hardware resources for signal processing are limited. However, there is a demand for more processing performance to make future hearing aids more useful and smarter. Future hearing aids should be able to detect, localize, and recognize target speakers in complex acoustic environments to further improve the speech intelligibility of the individual hearing aid user. Computationally intensive algorithms are required for this task. To maintain acceptable battery life, the hearing aid processing architecture must be highly optimized for extremely low-power consumption and high processing performance.The integration of application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIPs) into hearing aids enables a wide range of architectural customizations to meet the stringent power consumption and performance requirements. In this thesis, the application-specific hearing aid processor KAVUAKA is presented, which is customized and optimized with state-of-the-art hearing aid algorithms such as speaker localization, noise reduction, beamforming algorithms, and speech recognition. Specialized and application-specific instructions are designed and added to the baseline instruction set architecture (ISA). Among the major contributions are a multiply-accumulate (MAC) unit for real- and complex-valued numbers, architectures for power reduction during register accesses, co-processors and a low-latency audio interface. With the proposed MAC architecture, the KAVUAKA processor requires 16 % less cycles for the computation of a 128-point fast Fourier transform (FFT) compared to related programmable digital signal processors. The power consumption during register file accesses is decreased by 6 %to 17 % with isolation and by-pass techniques. The hardware-induced audio latency is 34 %lower compared to related audio interfaces for frame size of 64 samples.The final hearing aid system-on-chip (SoC) with four KAVUAKA processor cores and ten co-processors is integrated as an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) using a 40 nm low-power technology. The die size is 3.6 mm2. Each of the processors and co-processors contains individual customizations and hardware features with a varying datapath width between 24-bit to 64-bit. The core area of the 64-bit processor configuration is 0.134 mm2. The processors are organized in two clusters that share memory, an audio interface, co-processors and serial interfaces. The average power consumption at a clock speed of 10 MHz is 2.4 mW for SoC and 0.6 mW for the 64-bit processor.Case studies with four reference hearing aid algorithms are used to present and evaluate the proposed hardware architectures and optimizations. The program code for each processor and co-processor is generated and optimized with evolutionary algorithms for operation merging,instruction scheduling and register allocation. The KAVUAKA processor architecture is com-pared to related processor architectures in terms of processing performance, average power consumption, and silicon area requirements

Digital implementation of the cellular sensor-computers

Two different kinds of cellular sensor-processor architectures are used nowadays in various applications. The first is the traditional sensor-processor architecture, where the sensor and the processor arrays are mapped into each other. The second is the foveal architecture, in which a small active fovea is navigating in a large sensor array. This second architecture is introduced and compared here. Both of these architectures can be implemented with analog and digital processor arrays. The efficiency of the different implementation types, depending on the used CMOS technology, is analyzed. It turned out, that the finer the technology is, the better to use digital implementation rather than analog

Architectures for block Toeplitz systems

In this paper efficient VLSI architectures of highly concurrent algorithms for the solution of block linear systems with Toeplitz or near-to-Toeplitz entries are presented. The main features of the proposed scheme are the use of scalar only operations, multiplications/divisions and additions, and the local communication which enables the development of wavefront array architecture. Both the mean squared error and the total squared error formulations are described and a variety of implementations are given

FPGAs in Industrial Control Applications

The aim of this paper is to review the state-of-the-art of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technologies and their contribution to industrial control applications. Authors start by addressing various research fields which can exploit the advantages of FPGAs. The features of these devices are then presented, followed by their corresponding design tools. To illustrate the benefits of using FPGAs in the case of complex control applications, a sensorless motor controller has been treated. This controller is based on the Extended Kalman Filter. Its development has been made according to a dedicated design methodology, which is also discussed. The use of FPGAs to implement artificial intelligence-based industrial controllers is then briefly reviewed. The final section presents two short case studies of Neural Network control systems designs targeting FPGAs

Low-Power and Error-Resilient VLSI Circuits and Systems.

Efficient low-power operation is critically important for the success of the next-generation signal processing applications. Device and supply voltage have been continuously scaled to meet a more constrained power envelope, but scaling has created resiliency challenges, including increasing timing faults and soft errors. Our research aims at designing low-power and robust circuits and systems for signal processing by drawing circuit, architecture, and algorithm approaches. To gain an insight into the system faults due to supply voltage reduction, we researched the two primary effects that determine the minimum supply voltage (VMIN) in Intel’s tri-gate CMOS technology, namely process variations and gate-dielectric soft breakdown. We determined that voltage scaling increases the timing window that sequential circuits are vulnerable. Thus, we proposed a new hold-time violation metric to define hold-time VMIN, which has been adopted as a new design standard. Device scaling increases soft errors which affect circuit reliability. Through extensive soft error characterization using two 65nm CMOS test chips, we studied the soft error mechanisms and its dependence on supply voltage and clock frequency. This study laid the foundation of the first 65nm DSP chip design for a NASA spaceflight project. To mitigate such random errors, we proposed a new confidence-driven architecture that effectively enhances the error resiliency of deeply scaled CMOS and post-CMOS circuits. Designing low-power resilient systems can effectively leverage application-specific algorithmic approaches. To explore design opportunities in the algorithmic domain, we demonstrate an application-specific detection and decoding processor for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication. To enhance the receive error rate for a robust wireless communication, we designed a joint detection and decoding technique by enclosing detection and decoding in an iterative loop to enhance both interference cancellation and error reduction. A proof-of-concept chip design was fabricated for the next-generation 4x4 256QAM MIMO systems. Through algorithm-architecture optimizations and low-power circuit techniques, our design achieves significant improvements in throughput, energy efficiency and error rate, paving the way for future developments in this area.PhDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110323/1/uchchen_1.pd