Area efficient reconfigurable resource sharing architecture for future wireless communications

Abstract

The fast developments in the field of wireless communication require more flexible and cost effective radio architecture. This architecture should have the capability to dynamically alter the functional blocks of physical layer to support different wireless communication technology standards. Therefore, there is a demand for the use of a basic architecture that can be reconfigured to support both existing and future wireless communication technology standards. Field Programmable Gate Array architectures (FPGAs) provide a suitable platform to achieve such dynamic reconfigurations. This thesis explores the use of FPGAs in the design of reconfigurable architecture. Using a case study, it is demonstrated that this architecture efficiently configures to support different modulation schemes for Wide-band Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) standard and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), a.k.a Wireless Fidelity (WiFi). The most innovative part of this architecture is that it exploits multiplier-less algorithm and algorithmic strength reduction transformation technique to reduce large number of multipliers to achieve area efficiency. The thesis also proposes a method for mapping applications onto the reconfigurable resource sharing architecture. The similarities in computational processing elements of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in OFDM and RAKE receiver in WCDMA are identified and these elements are effectively reused in the hardware while reconfiguring to different standards. An area reduction of about 15-20 percent in the proposed FFT implementation and 90-91 percent in the proposed RAKE receiver is achieved compared to conventional architecture. This thesis demonstrates that the proposed architecture is used to provide flexibility, performance, efficiency and better resource utilization even while meeting the area and power constraints set by a particular design. newline newline newline