Low-Power ASIP Architecture Exploration and Optimization for Reed-Solomon Processing

The advent of the mobile age has heavily changed the requirements of today's communication devices. Data transmission over interference-prone wireless channels requires additional steps of data processing, such as forward error correction, to ensure reliable communication. In this work we present RS(63,55) Reed-Solomon encoding and decoding algorithms according to the IEEE 802.15.4a standard executed on dedicated application-specific processor architectures. Algorithmic as well as architectural modifications to speed up execution and well-known low-power techniques to reduce the power consumption are discussed. The speed-up for our proposed designs compared to a general purpose baseline architecture is up to two orders of magnitude. Power reduction due to clock-gating and guarded evaluation results in a 40% power drop and the energy consumption is decreased up to 60x.