MILAN: A Design Environment for Latency and Energy Efficient Implementation of Adaptive Antenna Applications

Abstract

Adaptive antenna applications demand high-performance, control and data intensive processing, and are deployed in energy constrained envi-ronments. Heterogeneous embedded systems that integrate several components such as reconfigurable devices, general purpose processors or DSPs, and memory onto a single system are attractive targets for implementing such applications. Such systems support various capabilities such as reconfiguration, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, and low-power operating states. Such choices during application design result in a large design space that must be traversed efficiently. We propose an embedded system design environment that enables efficient traversal of a large design space. The environment supports modeling of adaptive antenna applications, candidate hardware architectures, mapping information, performance requirements, and design constraints. Using the information captured in the models, the environment facilitates rapid design space exploration using optimization heuristics and hierarchical simulation. The design environment can be used to identify energy and latency efficient mappings for a given application and target hardware, or, if a set of hardware choices are given, select the most energy efficient hardware and the corresponding mapping. We illustrate the advantages of the design environment through efficient hardware selection for, and mapping of, an adaptive minimum variance distortionless response beamformer.