Field trial results for high-speed wireless indoor datacommunications

This paper reports on the development of a flexible 5-MBd equalized M-QAM testbed for high-speed wireless data communications. The unit operates in real time and was field tested in typical indoor environments. A total of 3600 independent experiments were conducted using the testbed where one of 4-, 16-, 64-QAM constellations were transmitted, and the performance as a function of adaptive equalization and antenna selection diversity was studied. The experimental results presented here help put previous simulation and analytical results into perspective and demonstrate some of the performance bounds associated with a practical implementation. The field trial results show that with only 10-mW of transmit power, reliable 10-Mbit/s data communication can take place in between rooms with a coverage radius of 17 m, and better than 15% outage at an uncoded bit error rate (BER) of 10^-3. The addition of two-branch antenna selection diversity to the system would allow 10-Mbit/s transmission at better than 3% outage and 20-Mbit/s transmission at 10% outage in the same environment. Moreover, 30-Mbit/s data transmission is feasible when both the transmitter and receiver are located within the same room, albeit at higher outage levels. In general, the results demonstrate the tremendous impact that adaptive equalization can have on the achievable performance of indoor links. Average SNR was improved anywhere from 8 dB to 12 dB depending on the particular environment and data rate. The impact on the outage performance, however, was much more dramatic     

A soft radio architecture for reconfigurable platforms

While many soft/software radio architectures have been suggested and implemented, there remains a lack of a formal design methodology that can be used to design and implement these radios. This article presents a unified architecture for the design of soft radios on a reconfigurable platform called the layered radio architecture. The layered architecture makes it possible to incorporate all of the features of a software radio while minimizing complexity issues. The layered architecture also enables a methodology for incorporating changes and updates into the system. An example implementation of the layered architecture on actual hardware is presented     

A two-level reconfigurable architecture for digital signal processing

This paper describes a novel reconfigurable architecture for digital signal processing (DSP). This architecture consists of a two-level array of cells and interconnections. On the upper level, fundamental DSP operations such as multiplication and addition are mapped onto blocks of 4-bit cells. On the lower level, each cell uses a 4 × 4 matrix of smaller “elements” to perform the necessary computations. Cells also contain pipeline latches for increased throughput. The architecture features a simple VLSI implementation that combines the flexibility of memory elements with the speed of DOMINO logic. Initial prototypes have been fabricated using a modest 0.5-μm CMOS technology. Circuit simulations of the cell in 0.25-μm technology indicate that the design achieves a clock frequency of 200 MHz.     

A reconfigurable multifunction computing cache architecture

A considerable portion of a microprocessor chip is dedicated to cache memory. However, not all applications need all the cache storage all the time, especially the computing bandwidth-limited applications. In addition, some applications have large embedded computations with a regular structure. Such applications may be able to use additional computing resources. If the unused portion of the cache could serve these computation needs, the on-chip resources would be utilized more efficiently. This presents an opportunity to explore the reconfiguration of a part of the cache memory for computing. Thus, we propose adaptive balanced computing (ABC)-dynamic resource configuration on demand from application-between memory and computing resources. In this paper, we present a cache architecture to convert a cache into a computing unit for either of the following two structured computations: finite impulse response and discrete/inverse discrete cosine transform. In order to convert a cache memory to a function unit, we include additional logic to embed multibit output lookup tables into the cache structure. The experimental results show that the reconfigurable module improves the execution time of applications with a large number of data elements by a factor as high as 50 and 60     

A reconfigurable processor architecture combining multi-core and reconfigurable processing units

It’s a promising way to improve performance significantly by adding reconfigurable processing unit (RPU) to a general purpose processor. In this paper, a Reconfigurable Multi-Core (RMC) architecture combining general multi-core and reconfigurable logic is proposed. Reconfigurable logic is separated into RPUs logically, which are coupled with general purpose cores as co-processors via a full crossbar switch. An RPU Manager (RPU-M) is also designed to manage RPUs. To verify RMC, a simulation method based on the Simics and Virtex 5 FPGA is adopted, which simplifies the simulation and assures the evaluation accuracy of hardware function cores. Five workloads are selected to test RMC, including 3-DES, AES, SHA2, IDCT and JPEG_ENC. The experimental results show a 3.10 times average speedup over software implementation on the original multi-core, and the data and control communication overhead on RMC is acceptable.     

光纤通信高速帧同步专用集成电路

本文介绍了一个四次群帧同步专用集成电路(ASIC)设计.该芯片(EC1101AP)实现接收和发送双向的155Mbit/s高速数据处理,在4.5mm×4.5mm硅片上集成了帧同步、扰码(解扰码)、奇偶校验、字节/半字节总线变换、告警生成等功能.EC1101AP芯片完成设计后,采用德克萨斯仪器公司的0.35微米工艺一次投片成功,已经成功应用于国产光纤通信SDH、DLC两种设备中.     

粗粒度可重构结构的性能估计方法

在设计初期,估计粗粒度可重构结构的性能,对粗粒度可重构结构设计具有指导意义.在考虑局部数据存储器结构以及局部数据存储器与可重构阵列的接口结构的情况下,建立了粗粒度可重构结构的参数模型,使用改进的螺旋形绑定策略将应用算法DFG(Data Flow Graph)中的算子绑定到可重构阵列的处理单元上,提出了一种粗粒度可重构结构的性能估计方法.应用实例表明,在设计初期,该方法能得到周期精确的估计结果,有效地指导粗粒度可重构结构的设计.     

A scalable parallel reconfigurable hardware architecture for DNA matching

DNA sequence matching is used in the identification of a relationship between a fragment of DNA and its owner by mean of a database of DNA registers. A DNA fragment could be a hair sample left at a crime scene by a suspect or provided by a person for a paternity exam. The process of aligning and matching DNA sequences is a computationally demanding process. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel hardware architecture for DNA matching based on the steps of the BLAST algorithm. The design is scalable so that its structure can be adjusted depending on the size of the subject and query DNA sequences. Moreover, the number of units used to perform in parallel can also be scaled depending some characteristics of the algorithm. The design was synthesized and programmed into FPGA. The trade-off between cost and performance were analyzed to evaluate different design configuration.     

A high-speed energy-efficient 64-bit reconfigurable binary adder

Datapaths for media signal processing are typically built using programmable computational elements such as adders and multipliers, which can be run-time reconfigured to operate on simple integers with 8, 16, or 32 bits of precision. In this brief, a new high-speed energy-efficient reconfigurable adder for media signal processing is presented. The proposed circuit is based on carry-propagation schemes and can be partitioned to perform one 64-, two 32-, four 16-, and eight 8-bit additions. When the Austria Mikro System (AMS) 0.35 /spl mu/m 2-poly 3-metal 3.3 V CMOS (CSD) process is used to produce layout, a worst propagation delay of about 4.9 ns and an average energy dissipation of about 181 /spl mu/W/MHz are obtained.     

Low-power and high-speed ROM modules for ASIC applications

We describe in this paper the design of a set of low-power and high-speed NOR-type ROM modules suitable for embedded applications in ASICs or SOCs. The circuit is derived from the four-phase high-speed precharge-discharge dynamic CMOS logic (NHS-PDCMOS) with the number of operational phases reduced from four to one. This facilitates the interconnections to other system blocks that are usually designed to be one phase. Experimental results show that for the size of 2K×8, the proposed high-speed ROM module is about 1.89 times faster, consumes 21% less power, and occupies similar silicon area as compared to a conventional design. Also for the same size, the proposed low-power ROM module is 1.17 times faster, 14% smaller, and consumes 83% less power as compared to the conventional design     

A high-performance VLSI architecture for reconfigurable FIR using distributed arithmetic

In this paper, we have analyzed the register complexity of direct-form and transpose-form structures of FIR filter and explored the possibility of register reuse. We find that direct-form structure involves significantly less registers than the transpose-form structure, and it allows register reuse in parallel implementation. We analyze further the LUT consumption and other resources of DA-based parallel FIR filter structures, and find that the input delay unit, coefficient storage unit and partial product generation unit are also shared besides LUT words when multiple filter outputs are computed in parallel. Based on these finding, we propose a design approach, and used that to derive a DA-based architecture for reconfigurable block-based FIR filter, which is scalable for larger block-sizes and higher filter-lengths. Interestingly, the number of registers of the proposed structure does not increase proportionately with the block-size. This is a major advantage for area-delay and energy efficient high-throughput implementation of reconfigurable FIR filters of higher block-sizes. Theoretical comparison shows that the proposed structure for block-size 8 and filter-length 64 involves 60% more flip-flops, 6.2 times more adders, 3.5 times more AND-OR gates, and offers 8 times higher throughput. ASIC synthesis result shows that the proposed structure for block-size 8 and filter-length 64 involves 1.8 times less area-delay product (ADP) and energy per sample (EPS) than the existing design, and it can support 8 times higher throughput. The proposed structure for block sizes 4 and 8, respectively, consumes 38% and 50% less power than the exiting structure for the same throughput rates on average for different supply voltages.     

A shift register architecture for high-speed data sorting

This paper presents a shift-register architecture or SRA, for data sorting applications. The operations performed by the proposed architecture are (1)shift right, (2)shift left, (3)load, and (4)initialize. Sorting operations, such as insert and delete, can be realized by the combination of these 4 basic operations. The architecture is very regular and mainly composed of two basic cells,sort-cell and compare-cell. The latter is designed to generate control signals orchestrating the operation of sort cells which contain the sorted input sequences. Experimental results show that a single chip solution can achieve real-time performance based on 1.2m CMOS double-metal technology.Work support by the National Science Council of Taiwan, ROC under grant NSC82-0404-E009-184.     

Stateful-NOR based reconfigurable architecture for logic implementation

Most commercial Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have limitations in terms of density, speed, configuration overhead and power consumption mostly due to the use of SRAM cells in Look-Up Tables (LUTs), configuration memory and programmable interconnects. Also, hardwired Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) blocks designed for high performance arithmetic circuits in FPGA reduce the area available for reconfiguration. In this paper, we propose a novel generalized hybrid CMOS-memristor based architecture using stateful-NOR gates as basic building blocks for implementation of logic functions. These logic functions are implemented on memristor nanocrossbar layers, while the CMOS layer is used for selection and connection of memristors. The proposed pipelined architecture combines the features of ASIC, FPGA and microprocessor based designs. It has high density due to the use of nanocrossbar layer and high throughput especially for arithmetic circuits. The proposed architecture for three input one output logic block is compared with conventional LUT based Configurable Logic Block (CLB) having the same number of inputs and outputs; which shows 1.82×area saving, 1.57×speedup and 3.63×less power consumption. The automation algorithm to implement any logic function using proposed architecture is also presented.     

An 8-bit low power DAC with re-used distributed binary cells architecture for reconfigurable transmitters

In this work an 8-bit DAC is presented which uses a new segmented architecture, where distributed binary cells are re-used in thermometric manner to realize the MSB unit cells. The DAC has been fabricated in 0.18 μm five-metal CMOS n-well process to be embedded in multi-standard reconfigurable wireless transmitters for low-speed applications. The proposed architecture has an inherent ability to reduce midcode glitch like the unary architecture, and the simulated midcode glitch is only 0.01 pV s. Simulation results show that the proposed DAC performs with an integral nonlinearity (INL) of 0.33 LSB and a differential nonlinearity (DNL) of 0.14 LSB. The DAC can achieve a maximum measured SFDR of 65.19 dB for 97.50 kHz signal at a sampling rate of 100 MSPS, without using any calibration or dynamic element matching (DEM) technique. For 1.07 MHz signal the measured SFDR is 56.84 dB at 100 MSPS sampling rate. At 50 MSPS sampling frequency and 146 kHz signal the SFDR of the DAC is 65.90 dB. The measured SFDR at 538 kHz signal is 63.62 dB for a sampling rate of 50 MSPS. Measured third order intermodulation distortion of the DAC is 58.55 dB, for a dual tone test with 1.03 MHz and 1.51 MHz signals at 50 MSPS sampling rate. Low power is also an important aspect in portable wireless devices. For 10.06 MHz signal and 100 MSPS sampling frequency, the power dissipation of the DAC is 20.74 mW with 1.8 V supply.     

A flexible gate array architecture for high-speed and high-densityapplications

A scaleable gate array has been designed in half-micron CMOS for a wide range of high-speed and high-density applications. Transistor size and position within the basecell provide an efficient implementation of flip-flops, combinational gates, and memory. Design benchmarks have demonstrated 2700 gates/mm² routed density in a 0.5 μm TLM CMOS gate array. Compared to previous 5 V 0.7 μm gate arrays, the new basecell provides improvements of 2.5x in density and 30% in speed, at 70% lower power, NAND-2 delays are 170 ps (FO=2, 3.3 V). Metal-programmable two-port SRAM's feature 3.9 ns typical access times. The new architecture has been implemented in a CMOS gate array family which offers up to 1.15 million available gates and 700 I/O positions     

A new successive approximation architecture for high-speed low-power ADCs

A new high-speed successive approximation analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architecture is presented. Two-bits extraction in each clock cycle is the key idea to double the conversion speed. Generating reference levels for three comparators with only two digital-to-analog converter (DACs), is another novelty of the new architecture. The proposed DAC structure allows a substantial reduction in overall control logic complexity. A 10-bit 40 Ms/S successive approximation ADC was designed based on the proposed architecture in CMOS technology. The simulation results show that the proposed architecture introduces 7% reduction in power consumption over conventional architecture. Furthermore, chip area for the new ADC is 40% less than what otherwise would be needed by an ADC using conventional architecture.     

Communication architecture design for reconfigurable multimedia SoC platform

Memory and communication architecture have a significant impact on the performance, cost, and power of complex multiprocessor system-on-chip designs. In this paper, we present an automated bus matrix synthesis flow for efficient transaction-level design space exploration of communication architecture in a reconfigurable multimedia system-on-chip platform. Specifically, we consider hardware interface selection problem, which has significant effect on the overall cost of area and power. We propose a method to solve such hardware interface selection problem through static analysis of communication behavior. We experiment with JPEG encoder and H.264 encoder examples and the results show the reduction of area by 56.91% and power by 48.61% of bus matrix with 0.58% performance overhead on average compared to the case of maximum performance. According to our HW interface selection algorithm, we also experiment MPEG4 video decoder example. And the result is evaluated on the FPGA prototyping board.     

A reconfigurable ethernet/SONET circuit-based metro network architecture

We propose a service concept in which high-speed Ethernet interfaces from end hosts are dynamically cross-connected to equivalent-rate Ethernet-over-SONET (EoS) optical circuits for transport across metro-area networks and/or wide-area networks. We call our service concept reconfigurable Ethernet/SONET circuits to end users (RESCUE). We describe how RESCUE can be used for two applications: dial-up service to Internet service provider routers and file transfers. We propose to deploy RESCUE service as an "add-on" to current Internet access for many reasons. Primary among these is that it allows a metro optical circuit-switched network to be operated at a high utilization, which is important to achieve a cost-effective bandwidth-efficient network. Given that end hosts with access to RESCUE service will have a choice of two paths, the primary Internet path and a secondary RESCUE option, end-host applications will need to make a routing decision. We carry out a quantitative analysis to provide a basis for this routing decision for both dial-up service and file transfers. For example, with the file-transfer application, if call-blocking probability on the optical circuit-switched network is 30% and the packet-loss rate on the transmission control protocol/Internet protocol path is 1%, a circuit setup should be attempted for files 180 KB or larger in low-propagation delay environments.     

一种可重构阵列结构及其任务调度算法

提出了一种可以利用计算时间覆盖配置时间和数据传输时间的可重构阵列结构,并且针对该可重构阵列结构提出了一种表调度算法进行任务调度.在SOCDesigner平台上进行了软硬件协同仿真,对于IDCT,FFT,4×4矩阵乘法新可重构阵列相比原来的可重构阵列有平均约10%的速度提升.