A low-power ASIP for IEEE 802.15.4a ultra-wideband impulse radio baseband processing

The IEEE 802.15.4a amendment has introduced ultra-wideband impulse radio (UWB IR) as a promising physical layer for energy-efficient, low data rate communications. A critical part of the UWB IR receiver design is the low-power implementation of the digital baseband processing required for synchronization and data decoding. In this paper we present the development of an application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) that is tailored to the requirements defined by the baseband algorithms. We report a number of optimizations applied to the algorithms as well as to the hardware architecture. This enables performance increases up to a factor of 122x and energy consumption decreases up to 90x as compared to a 16-bit baseline architecture. Furthermore, this ASIP offers greater flexibility due to programmability as compared to an ASIC implementation.