Implementation of a Low Power Low Complexity ASIP for various Sphere Decoding Algorithms

Inhalt:
Programmability is a welcome feature to use hardware modules in different products. However, in mobile applications power consumption is an important limitation. Very complex algorithms can be found in wireless communication that require efficient processing considering computation performance as well as power consumption. For the application area of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) signal detection, Sphere Decoding is a popular method. We pick several of those algorithms with similar basic instructions and design an application specific instruction set processor (ASIP). We show the optimized microarchitecture of the data path and the defined instruction set. Further power reduction is achieved by low level power optimization methods.