Multicore chip supports SDR apps
Grenoble, France: French research and technology organization CEA-Leti has developed a digital baseband circuit for software-defined-radio (SDR) and cognitive-radio applications that provides full reconfiguration and multi-applications support in less than 50 µs.
Developed for fourth-generation mobile phones, it is based on CEA-Leti’s mesh asynchronous network-on-chip (ANOC) infrastructure delivering 2.2 Gbytes/s/link. It includes 23 integrated processors dedicated to signal processing and bit-level processing associated with an ARM1176 processor for medium access control.
For the first time a full baseband circuit can be reconfigured in less than 50 µs (maximum time), while typical test cases show a 4-µs reconfiguration-time (average time observed). Moreover, its multi-application support enables the sharing of the computing units between two radio access technologies (RATs). These two features make the Magali particularly useful for SDR and cognitive-radio applications.
Power management has been a major optimization goal during the development of this chip. Based on ANOC technology, 23 frequency islands can be programmed dynamically to ensure the best performance/energy ratio. As a result, the circuit exhibits less than 500 mW for up to 40 Goperations per second. The Magali also has been tested on a 3GPP-LTE application, delivering 50 Mbits/s on a 4x2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) scheme.
CEAlLeti
