ASIP design for multiuser MIMO broadcast precoding

This paper presents an application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) for multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) broadcast precoding. The ASIP is designed for a base station (BS) with four antennas to perform user scheduling and precoding. Transport triggered architecture (TTA) is used as the processor template and high level language is used to program the ASIP. Several special function units (SFU) are designed to accelerate norm-based greedy user scheduling and minimum-mean square error (MMSE) precoding. We also program zero forcing dirty paper coding (ZF-DPC) to demonstrate the reusability of the ASIP. A single core provides a throughput of 52.17 Mbps for MMSE precoding and takes an area of 87.53 kgates at 200 MHz on 90 nm technology.