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

Parallel Architecture Design for OpenVX Kernel Image Processing Functions

Although the traditional programmable processors are highly flexible, their processing speed and perfor-mance are inferior to the application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Image processing is often a diverse, intensive and repetitive operation, so the processor must balance speed, performance and flexibility. OpenVX is an open source standard for preprocessing or auxiliary processing of image processing, graph computing and deep learning applications. Aiming at the kernel visual function library of OpenVX 1.3 standard, this paper designs and implements a programmable and extensible OpenVX parallel processor. The architecture adopts an application specific instruction processor (ASIP). After analyzing and comparing the topological characteristics of various interconnection networks, the backbone of the ASIP chooses the hierarchically cross-connected Mesh+ (HCCM+) with outstanding performance, and processing element (PE) is set at network nodes. PE array is constructed to support dynamic configuration, and a parallel processor is designed to realize programmable image processing based on efficient routing and com-munication. The proposed architecture is suitable for data parallel computing and emerging graph computing. The two computing modes can be configured separately or mixed. The kernel visual function and graph computing model are mapped to the parallel processor respectively to verify the two modes and compare the image processing speed under different PE numbers. The results show that OpenVX parallel processor can complete the mapping and linear speedup of kernel functions and high complexity graph calculation model. The average speedup of scheduling 16 PEs to various functions is approximately 15.0375. When implemented on an FPGA board with a 20 nm XCVU440 device, the prototype can run at a frequency of 125 MHz

A mixed-signal early vision chip with embedded image and programming memories and digital I/O

From a system level perspective, this paper presents a 128 × 128 flexible and reconfigurable Focal-Plane Analog Programmable Array Processor, which has been designed as a single chip in a 0.35μm standard digital 1P-5M CMOS technology. The core processing array has been designed to achieve high-speed of operation and large-enough accuracy (∼ 7bit) with low power consumption. The chip includes on-chip program memory to allow for the execution of complex, sequential and/or bifurcation flow image processing algorithms. It also includes the structures and circuits needed to guarantee its embedding into conventional digital hosting systems: external data interchange and control are completely digital. The chip contains close to four million transistors, 90% of them working in analog mode. The chip features up to 330GOPs (Giga Operations per second), and uses the power supply (180GOP/Joule) and the silicon area (3.8 GOPS/mm2) efficiently, as it is able to maintain VGA processing throughputs of 100Frames/s with about 15 basic image processing tasks on each frame