A Reconfigurable Outer Modem Platform for Future Communications Systems

Future mobile and wireless communications networks require flexible modem architectures with high performance. Efficient utilization of application specific flexibility is key to fulfill these requirements. For high throughput a single processor can not provide the necessary computational power. Hence multi-processor architectures become necessary. This paper presents a multi-processor platform based on a new dynamically reconfigurable application specific instruction set processor (dr-ASIP) for the application domain of channel decoding. Inherently parallel decoding tasks can be mapped onto individual processing nodes. The implied challenging inter-processor communication is efficiently handled by a Network-on-Chip (NoC) such that the throughput of each node is not degraded. The dr-ASIP features Viterbi and Log-MAP decoding for support of convolutional and turbo codes of more than 10 currently specified mobile and wireless standards. Furthermore, its flexibility allows for adaptation to future systems.