A Low-Power DSP for Wireless Communications

This paper proposes a low-power high-throughput Digital Signal Processor (DSP) for baseband processing in wireless terminals. It builds on the earlier architecture - Signal processing On Demand Architecture (SODA) - which is a four-processor, 32-lane SIMD machine that was optimized for WCDMA 2 Mbps and IEEE 802.11a. SODA has several shortcomings including large register file power, wasted cycles for data alignment, etc., and cannot satisfy the higher throughput and lower power requirements of emerging standards.