A Flexible Divide-and-Conquer MPSoC Architecture for MIMO Interference Cancellation

The fast-evolving standards of the wireless communication systems drive the demand for flexible baseband processing platforms. However, with the proliferation of MIMO technologies, traditional single-core-based solutions are hardly able to fulfill requirements with acceptable power and area cost. The reliance on multi-/many-core system is increasing. Different from the computation-limited single-core-based solutions, multi/many-core systems are often communication-limited. In this paper, aiming at MIMO interference cancellation algorithms, we propose a flexible master-slave-based multiprocessor system-on-chiparchitecture based on a systematically divide-and-conquer approach to optimize the communication problems from the application-, architecture- and programming-levels. First, a comprehensively analysis of several typical applications in terms of parallelism, communication patterns and computation patterns is presented. According to the analysis results, a low-complexity and flexible ad hoc point-to-point interconnected fine-grained programmable-element (f -PE) is proposed to execute the arithmetic calculation. In order to reduce the communication traffic, an f-PE-based slave-node is constructed to exploit the data and instruction localities of applications, and a master node that is used to schedule and serve data for the slave nodes is also integrated. Furthermore, to improve the ease of use of the architecture, a multiple instruction multiple data like programming model is adopted and an optimizing mapping strategy is developed. In order to show its flexibility potential, seven linear and nonlinear IC algorithms with distinct computation natures are implemented on the proposed architecture. Finally, the gate-level synthesis and postlayout results are presented to demonstrate the strength and weaknesses of our design.