76 research outputs found
Adaptive Wireless Networking
This paper presents the Adaptive Wireless Networking (AWGN) project. The project aims to develop methods and technologies that can be used to design efficient adaptable and reconfigurable mobile terminals for future wireless communication systems. An overview of the activities in the project is given. Furthermore our vision on adaptivity in wireless communications and suggestions for future activities are presented
Optimising and evaluating designs for reconfigurable hardware
Growing demand for computational performance, and the rising cost for chip design and
manufacturing make reconfigurable hardware increasingly attractive for digital system implementation.
Reconfigurable hardware, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs),
can deliver performance through parallelism while also providing flexibility to enable
application builders to reconfigure them. However, reconfigurable systems, particularly
those involving run-time reconfiguration, are often developed in an ad-hoc manner. Such
an approach usually results in low designer productivity and can lead to inefficient designs.
This thesis covers three main achievements that address this situation. The first
achievement is a model that captures design parameters of reconfigurable hardware and
performance parameters of a given application domain. This model supports optimisations
for several design metrics such as performance, area, and power consumption. The second
achievement is a technique that enhances the relocatability of bitstreams for reconfigurable
devices, taking into account heterogeneous resources. This method increases the flexibility
of modules represented by these bitstreams while reducing configuration storage size and
design compilation time. The third achievement is a technique to characterise the power
consumption of FPGAs in different activity modes. This technique includes the evaluation
of standby power and dedicated low-power modes, which are crucial in meeting the
requirements for battery-based mobile devices
Multi-standard programmable baseband modulator for next generation wireless communication
Considerable research has taken place in recent times in the area of
parameterization of software defined radio (SDR) architecture. Parameterization
decreases the size of the software to be downloaded and also limits the
hardware reconfiguration time. The present paper is based on the design and
development of a programmable baseband modulator that perform the QPSK
modulation schemes and as well as its other three commonly used variants to
satisfy the requirement of several established 2G and 3G wireless communication
standards. The proposed design has been shown to be capable of operating at a
maximum data rate of 77 Mbps on Xilinx Virtex 2-Pro University field
programmable gate array (FPGA) board. The pulse shaping root raised cosine
(RRC) filter has been implemented using distributed arithmetic (DA) technique
in the present work in order to reduce the computational complexity, and to
achieve appropriate power reduction and enhanced throughput. The designed
multiplier-less programmable 32-tap FIR-based RRC filter has been found to
withstand a peak inter-symbol interference (ISI) distortion of -41 dB
The Chameleon Architecture for Streaming DSP Applications
We focus on architectures for streaming DSP applications such as wireless baseband processing and image processing. We aim at a single generic architecture that is capable of dealing with different DSP applications. This architecture has to be energy efficient and fault tolerant. We introduce a heterogeneous tiled architecture and present the details of a domain-specific reconfigurable tile processor called Montium. This reconfigurable processor has a small footprint (1.8 mm in a 130 nm process), is power efficient and exploits the locality of reference principle. Reconfiguring the device is very fast, for example, loading the coefficients for a 200 tap FIR filter is done within 80 clock cycles. The tiles on the tiled architecture are connected to a Network-on-Chip (NoC) via a network interface (NI). Two NoCs have been developed: a packet-switched and a circuit-switched version. Both provide two types of services: guaranteed throughput (GT) and best effort (BE). For both NoCs estimates of power consumption are presented. The NI synchronizes data transfers, configures and starts/stops the tile processor. For dynamically mapping applications onto the tiled architecture, we introduce a run-time mapping tool
Adaptivity and Reconfigurability in Wireless Communications
A key issue of future wireless communication systems is that they have to be adaptive. In the Adaptive Wireless Networking (AWGN) project we aim at the implementation of adaptive wireless communication systems in a heterogeneous reconfigurable System-on-a-Chip (HRSoC). We introduce our methodologies for analyzing and mapping DSP functionality in dynamically reconfigurable heterogeneous hardware. A possible implementation of a multi-mode communication system in the MONTIUM architecture is discussed. Suggestions for future activities in the Adaptive Wireless Networking project are also given
Software Defined Radio Platform for Cognitive Radio: Design and Hierarchical Management
ISBN 978-953-307-274-6Cognitive radio (CR) and/or Software Defined Radio (SDR) inherently require multiband and multi-standard wireless circuit. A SDR is a communications device whose functionality is defined in software. Defining the radio behaviour in software removes the need for hardware alterations during a technology upgrade. A promised open architecture platform for SDR is proposed in this chapter. The platform consists of reconfigurable and reprogrammable hardware platform which provide different standards with a common platform, the SDR software framework which control and manage the whole systems, and the protocol processing software modules which is built on reusable protocol libraries. The main idea here is to have a very flexible platform that enables us to test the validity of the following design approaches: FPGA dynamic partial reconfiguration techniques, parameterization design approach using common operators, hierarchical distributed reconfiguration management
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