Energy-efficient software-defined radio solutions for MIMO-based broadband communication

Multi-antenna transmission over multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) channels are considered in almost all recent broadband wireless communication standards. Besides, the fast-pacing diversity and evolution of those standards, next to the deep submicron integration cost explosion, urges multi-mode reconfigurable solutions. Software Defined Radio (SDR) is envisioned to enable low-cost, high-volume multi-mode baseband modems both for base-station and user terminals. Yet, supporting high-throughput MIMO standard with limited energy budget as in user terminals is a challenge for SDR architectures. With Space Division Multiplexing (SDM) for instance, N being the number of antennas, the computation load is multiplied by >N
²
. Capitalizing on a low complexity SDM-OFDM functional architecture, a heterogeneous multi-processor SoC platform with DSP cores delivering 50 to 250MOPS/mW and an integrated software development flow, we demonstrate the SDR implementation of 100Mbps+ SDM-OFDM with 3.6 nJ/bit energy efficiency (383mW average power).