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Handbook of Signal Processing Systems pp 741–777Cite as

Application-Specific Accelerators for Communications

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Abstract

For computation-intensive digital signal processing algorithms, complexity is exceeding the processing capabilities of general-purpose digital signal processors (DSPs). In some of these applications, DSP hardware accelerators have been widely used to off-load a variety of algorithms from the main DSP host, including FFT, FIR/IIR filters, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detectors, and error correction codes (Viterbi, Turbo, LDPC) decoders. Given power and cost considerations, simply implementing these computationally complex parallel algorithms with high-speed general-purpose DSP processor is not very efficient. However, not all DSP algorithms are appropriate for off-loading to a hardware accelerator. First, these algorithms should have data-parallel computations and repeated operations that are amenable to hardware implementation. Second, these algorithms should have a deterministic dataflow graph that maps to parallel datapaths. The accelerators that we consider are mostly coarse grain to better deal with streaming data transfer for achieving both high performance and low power. In this chapter, we focus on some of the basic and advanced digital signal processing algorithms for communications and cover major examples of DSP accelerators for communications.

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Acknowledgements

The authors at Rice University would like to thank Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), Xilinx, and US National Science Foundation (under grants CCF-0541363, CNS-0551692, CNS-0619767, EECS-0925942 and CNS-0923479) for their support of this work.

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  1. Rice University, 6100 Main St., Houston, TX, 77005, USA

    Yang Sun, Kiarash Amiri, Michael Brogioli & Joseph R. Cavallaro

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  1. Yang Sun
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  4. Joseph R. Cavallaro
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  1. , Dept. of Electrical and, University of Maryland, A. V. Williams Bldg. 2311, College Park, 20742, Maryland, USA

    Shuvra S. Bhattacharyya

  2. Leiden Inst. Advanced Computer Science, Leiden Embedded Research Center, Leiden University, Niels Bohrweg 1, Leiden, 2333 CA, Netherlands

    Ed F. Deprettere

  3. Software for Systems on Silicon, RWTH Aachen University, Templergraben 55, Aachen, 52056, Germany

    Rainer Leupers

  4. , Department of Pervasive Computing, Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu 1, Tampere, 33720, Finland

    Jarmo Takala

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Sun, Y., Amiri, K., Brogioli, M., Cavallaro, J.R. (2013). Application-Specific Accelerators for Communications. In: Bhattacharyya, S., Deprettere, E., Leupers, R., Takala, J. (eds) Handbook of Signal Processing Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6859-2_23

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