Flexible front-end processing for software defined radio applications using application specific instruction-set processors

High computational demands of today's wireless communication standards require the design of highly flexible Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms like the OpenAirInter-face ExpressMIMO platform. A DSP engine of major importance is the Front-End Processor (FEP) which deals with the different air-interface operations at the transceiver side. In this paper we propose an Application Specific Instruction-Set Processor (ASIP) architecture for front-end processing and compare it to a programmable DSP engine as well as to other ASIP solutions. For design comparison we mainly focus on architectural differences and the runtime performance in terms of processing time. The synthesis results are provided for different target technologies.