A programmable SIMD-based multi-standard Rake receiver architecture

Programmability with its associated flexibility will be increasingly important in future multi-standard radio systems. We are presenting a fully programmable and flexible DSP platform capable of efficiently performing channel estimation and MRC-based channel equalization for several CDMA based wireless transmission systems in software. Our processor is based on a DSP core with SIMD-computing clusters. We have mapped Rake receiver kernel-functions supporting several 3G standards to this micro-architecture and benchmarking shows that with the proposed instruction set architecture, our architecture can support channel estimation, equalization and decoding of: WCDMA FDD/TDD-modes and HSDPA at clock rate not exceeding 76 MHz during soft handover conditions.