SYSTEM-ON-CHIP ARCHITECTURES FOR SIGNAL PROCESSING AND COMMUNICAnONS

Abstract

System-On-Chip (SOC) is one of the most popular Computer Aided Design (CAD) methodologies in electronic system design. In this research, SOC design is investigated in two different types of applications: i) low cost and power efficient applications; and ii) high performance computing applications. To explore low cost and power efficient design, a microcontroller based wireless medical system is investigated. Two wireless communication protocols for medical applications and patient monitoring are analyzed. In addition, the ZigBee stack developed by TI and a medical amplifier are discussed. For high performance SOC applications, implementations of several matrix operations are examined. An improved fixed-point hardware design of QR decomposition is introduced and optimized for Xilinx FPGAs. A Givens Rotation algorithm is implemented using a folded systolic array and the CORDIC algorithm. This approach is highly suitable for high-speed FPGAs or ASIC designs. It is found that the Xilinx XC5VLX110T FPGA is capable of running the QR decomposition at 246MHz.M.S. in Electrical Engineering, May 201