Reconfigurable pipelined coprocessor for multi-mode communication transmission

Abstract

The need to integrate multiple wireless communication protocols into a single low-cost, low-power hardware platform is prompted by the increasing number of emerging communication protocols and applications. This paper presents a novel application specific platform for integrating multiple wireless communication transmission baseband protocols in a pipelined coprocessor, which can be programmed to support various baseband protocols. This coprocessor can dynamically select the suitable pipeline stages for each baseband protocol. Moreover, each carefully designed stage is able to perform a certain signal processing function in a reconfigurable fashion. The proposed platform is flexible (compared to ASICs) and is suitable for mobile applications (compared to FPGAs and processors). The area footprint of the coprocessor is smaller than an ASIC or FPGA implementation of multiple individual protocols, while the overhead of throughput is 34% worse than ASICs and 32% better than FPGAs. The power consumption is 2.7X worse than ASICs but 40X better than FPGAs on average. The proposed platform outperforms processor implementation in all area, throughput and power consumption. Moreover, fast protocol switching is supported. Wireless LAN (WLAN) 802.11 a, WLAN 802.11 b and Ultra Wide Band (UWB) transmission circuits are developed and mapped to the pipelined coprocessor to prove the efficacy of our proposal.