FINDING THE OPTIMUM PARTITIONING FOR MULTI-STANDARD RADIO SYSTEMS

Future wireless communication systems must support multi- ple radio standards and be capable of executing them con- currently. Consequently, flexibility and programmability will be two of the most important features. However, even a flexible solution has to fulfill the traditional constraints on silicon area and power dissipation. In this paper we address the problem of designing a cost-efficient radio solution start- ing from the application level. We describe a methodology that drives the design in five phases from application to im- plementation. We apply this approach in the design of our solution for software-defined radio (SDR) terminals. Here, an optimum partitioning between all components of a multi- standard transceiver system has to be found. The outcome is a heterogeneous platform with a multi-standard baseband circuit and multiple front-ends. The baseband circuit con- sists of multiple DSP cores and dedicated accelerators and is fully software-programmable.