Two Scenarios of Flexible Multi-Standard Architecture Designs using a Multi-Granularity Exploration

The design of future multi-standard systems still remains a challenge. Current habits are to associate existing separated systems in a device. This implies a duplication of radio systems, which is not economically viable in the long term, for cost, form factor, power consumption, cosmetic, etc. reasons. Flexible architectures exploiting processing commonalities of the different set of standards cohabiting in the device offer promising solutions. An approach for designing flexible multi-standard radio systems is proposed. It consists in exploring the design of multi-standard systems at different levels of granularity and selects the convenient level depending on each designer's needs. It consists first in making a graph description of the multi-standard system to be designed. Then, an architectural exploration (not in the scope of this paper) extracts the operators of a given multi-standard device. These operators are requested to have enhanced reconfiguration capabilities so that a fast reconfiguration is implementable. This paper illustrates our approach with two scenarios of multi-standard radio system designs. Furthermore this paper discusses the scheduling issues related to our design approach.