From SODA to Scotch: The Evolution of a Wireless Baseband Processor

With the multitude of existing and upcoming wireless standards, it is becoming increasingly difficult for hardware-only baseband processing solutions to adapt to the rapidly changing wireless communication landscape. Software Defined Radio (SDR) promises to deliver a cost effective and flexible solution by implementing a wide variety of wireless protocols in software. In previous work, a fully programmable multicore architecture, SODA, was proposed that was able to meet the real-time requirements of 3G wireless protocols. SODA consists of one ARM control processor and four wide Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) processing elements. Each processing element consists of a scalar and a wide 512- bit 32-lane SIMD datapath.