Flexible Front-End Processing for Software Defined Radio Applications using Application Specific Instruction-Set Processors

Abstract : High computational demands of today’s wireless communication standards require the design of highly flexible Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms like the OpenAirInterface ExpressMIMO platform. A DSP engine of major importance is the Front-End Processor (FEP) which deals with the different air-interface operations at the transceiver side. In this paper we propose an Application Specific Instruction-Set Processor (ASIP) architecture for front-end processing and compare it to a programmable DSP engine as well as to other ASIP solutions. For design comparison we mainly focus on architectural differences and the run-time performance in terms of processing time. The synthesis results are provided for different target technologies.