High-Level Design Space and Flexibility Exploration for Adaptive, Energy-Efficient WCDMA Channel Estimation Architectures

Due to the fast changing wireless communication standards coupled with strict performance constraints, the demand for flexible yet high-performance architectures is increasing. To tackle the flexibility requirement, software-defined radio (SDR) is emerging as an obvious solution, where the underlying hardware implementation is tuned via software layers to the varied standards depending on power-performance and quality requirements leading to adaptable, cognitive radio. In this paper, we conduct a case study for representatives of two complexity classes of WCDMA channel estimation algorithms and explore the effect of flexibility on energy efficiency using different implementation options. Furthermore, we propose new design guidelines for both highly specialized architectures and highly flexible architectures using high-level synthesis, to enable the required performance and flexibility to support multiple applications. Our experiments with various design points show that the resulting architectures meet the performance constraints of WCDMA and a wide range of options are offered for tuning such architectures depending on power/performance/area constraints of SDR

High-Level State Machine Specification and Synthesis

Current synthesis methodologies based on hardware-description languages focus mainly on two distinct levels: behavior and register-transfer levels. In many practical cases, however, the initial specification lies between a pure behavioral description and a completely structural one. This paper presents a method and algorithms for exploring the design space between the register-transfer and behavioral levels. The method consists of the specification of a high-level state machine, which combines the advantages of a specific control structure, by means of states and transitions, with the flexibility of behavioral descriptions inside each high-level state. High-level synthesis techniques are used for synthesizing this machine. As a result, the user has control over the final controller implementation and is able to perform high-level trade-o#s between control and data-path