Implementation of Multi-standard Wireless Communication Receivers in a Heterogeneous Reconfigurable System-on-Chip

Future mobile terminals become multi-mode communication systems. In order to handle different standards, we propose to perform baseband processing in heterogeneous reconfigurable hardware. Not only the baseband processing but also error decoding differs for every communication system. We already proposed implementations of the baseband processing part of an OFDM receiver and a Wideband CDMA receiver in a heterogeneous reconfigurable system-on-chip. The system-on-chip contains processing elements of different granularities, which includes our coarse-grained reconfigurable MONTIUM architecture. Now, we also implemented an adaptive Viterbi decoder in the same coarse-grained MONTIUM architecture. The rate, constraint length and decision depth of the decoder can be adjusted to different communication systems. We show that the flexibility in the coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture is more than 200 times as energy-efficient compared to a general purpose solution but only 24 times less efficient compared to a dedicated solution.