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Component-Based Waveform Development: The Nucleus Tool Flow for Efficient and Portable Software Defined Radio

Authors:
Castrillon, J. ,  Schürmans, S. ,  Stulova, A. ,  Sheng, W. ,  Kempf, T. ,  Leupers, R. ,  Ascheid, G. ,  Meyr, H.
Journal:
Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing
Volume:
69
Page(s):
173--190
number:
2
Date:
Oct. 2011
Note:

ISSN 0925-1030

DOI:
10.1007/s10470-011-9670-1
Language:
English
Abstract:
With the advent ofMulti-Processor Systems
on Chip (MPSoCs) and due to the complexity and variety
of modern wireless standards, academia and industry are
moving towards Software Defined Radio (SDR)
solutions. It is the goal of the SDR approach to allow
designers to describe a radio standard or waveform by
means of a high level language. This allows faster waveform
development cycles and makes it easier to migrate
waveforms across different platforms.
Out of many software paradigms, Component-Based
Software Engineering (CBSE) is an attractive match for
SDR, especially for baseband applications. It abstracts
waveforms in the traditional way algorithm designers
think of their applications and guarantees a high degree
of portability. However, existing CBSE approaches for
SDR have not been able to close the gap between
specification and implementation so as to achieve the
computational performance and the energy efficiency of
handcrafted solutions. The main reason for this gap is that
these flows rely on traditional compilers to lower the
high level specification to the platform. The work
presented in this paper builds on the Nucleus Concept [30]
in which computationally intensive kernels and their
implementation characteristics on the target platform
are known. This information allows a tool to close the
performance gap, and thus enables efficient component-
based SDR development. In this paper we present such
a flow and its supporting environment, which includes
state-of-the-art tools for system level design. The flow
is demonstrated on a MIMO OFDM transceiver.
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