Processor architecture for software implementation of multi-sector G-RAKE receivers for HSUPA wireless infrastructure

The high speed uplink packet access (HSUPA) wireless standard requires extremely high-performance signal processing in the baseband receiver, the most challenging being the chip rate rake receiver. In this paper we describe the architectural enhancements on the IBM's PowerEN processor, to enable it to support the computational requirements of the rake receiver in a fully programmable and scalable fashion. A key feature of these enhancements is a bank-based very-large register file, with embedded single instruction multiple data (SIMD) support. This processor-in-regfile (PIR) strategy is implemented as local computation elements (LCEs) attached to each bank. This overcomes the limitation on the number of register file ports and at the same time enables high degree of parallelism. We show that these enhancements enable the integration of multi-sector HSUPA G-RAKE receivers on a single processor.