Application of the Intel^® reconfigurable communications architecture to 802.11a, 3G and 4G standards

The increasing number of wireless LAN, MAN, PAN and WAN standards creates challenges for wireless equipment manufacturers: support multiple protocols in a multimode radio, reduce time to market for adding new capability for new standards, and keeping up with the ever increasing data rates that are required. One solution to these challenges is the Intel^® reconfigurable communications architecture (RCA). RCA is a power and area efficient design for physical layer (PHY) and lower MAC processing. To achieve the desired efficiency for multiprotocol processing, we defined several programmable accelerators for key communications operations. This work describes our analysis of mapping various wireless protocols (WLAN, 3G and a proposed 4G standard) to RCA. These results indicate that our architecture has enough flexibility and scalability to support a range of standards.