DMA-powered SDR processor exploiting DLP in LTE-Advanced

Software-defined radio (SDR) allows for the implementation and support of various wireless communication standards within a short development period. LTE-Advanced, which is the latest high-speed standard, demands a huge number of matrix calculations. We previously developed a digital signal processor (DSP) architecture with a direct memory access (DMA) function for exploiting data level parallelism (DLP) in LTE-Advanced and in the present work we evaluated the performance of this DSP. The results show that our DSP is 21.2 times faster than a multi-core of equivalent size consisting of 10 general purpose processors (GPPs).