A Framework for the Design Space Exploration of Software-Defined Radio Applications

This paper describes a framework for the design space exploration of resource-efficient software-defined radio architectures. This design space exploration is based on a dual design flow, using a central processor specification as reference for the hardware development and the automatic generation of a C-compiler based tool chain. Using our modular rapid prototyping environment RAPTOR and the RF-frontend DB-SDR, functional verification of SDR applications can be performed. An 802.11b transmitter SDR implementation is mapped on our CoreVA a VLIW architecture and evaluated in terms of execution time and energy consumption. By introducing application specific instruction set extensions and a dedicated hardware accelerator, execution time and energy consumption could be reduced by about 90%.