Arithmetic Units for Software Defined Radio

Software defined radios provide programmable solutions for implementing the physical layer processing of multiple communication standards. Mobile devices implementing these standards require high performance processors with specialized arithmetic units to perform high bandwidth physical-layer processing in real time. In this paper, we present arithmetic units that improve the performance of several important communication algorithms. The benefits of these arithmetic units and their corresponding instruction set extensions are evaluated using a vectorizing compiler and the Sandblaster low-power multithreaded processor for software defined radio. Instruction set extensions that use these specialized arithmetic units provide significant performance improvements at relatively low cost.