A software defined approach for common baseband processing

We present a novel software defined approach for designing and implementing common baseband processing tasks. Our focus is on exploring the algorithmic and architectural design spaces of 3G and 4G systems to identify the computational and geometric structures shared by diverse coding schemes, services and hardware platforms, and the efficient and flexible integration of these structures on innovative extensible hardware. With an existing protocol processor design framework as our starting point, we add flexibility to the physical layer of the radio application domain by defining a methodology and a hardware platform for designing programmable open wireless architecture-enabled device instances. The proposed methodology executes in two phases: (a) initial design, which is done to a single standard using our design principles and methods, and (b) extension phase where the system upgrade is done component by component. The approach standardizes control structures, component abstractions, implementation of the architecture itself as well as methods for interactive optimization. Thus, in both design phases there is only a need to consider changes in component functionality and connectivity. We demonstrate the approach by initially targeting digital television, and then extending the system with minimal effort to support GSM. The costs of the GSM extension in the system were an area increase of 2.4%, a power increase of 2.7% and four days in hardware design and verification.