A Coarse-Grained Array Accelerator for Software-Defined Radio Baseband Processing

A shrinking energy budget for mobile devices and increasingly complex communication standards make architecture development for software-defined radio very challenging. Coarse-grained array accelerators are strong candidates for achieving both high performance and low power. The C-programmable hybrid CGA-SIMD accelerator presented here targets emerging broadband cellular and wireless LAN standards, achieving up to 100-Mbps throughput with an average power consumption of 220 mW.