Transport triggered architecture to perform carrier synchronization for LTE

Abstract

In this article implementation of carrier frequency offset estimate for 20MHz LTE baseband processing is discussed. LTE (Long Term Evolution) is a wireless communication standard that makes use of some innovative techniques to gain very high data rates (>100Mbps). This goal for such a high throughput also imposes design challenges for the industry and academia such as in the case of handheld mobile devices where the power budget is very limited. Implicitly high throughput means we need more computation power and more energy. On the other hand industry is also struggling for a flexible hardware solution, or software defined a radio (SDR), to amortize the huge cost of required hardware changes as the wireless standards have kept evolving. Design innovations are now needed to confront those challenges of low power and flexible design without changing the hardware. The implementation is made on Transport Triggered Architecture (TTA), which is a unique concept in computer architecture design, based on the single instruction, "MOVE". The power consumption of the architecture when synthesized on 180nm technology at 180MHz and 1.8V is 18.39mW. The total area occupied excluding memory is 0.6mm 2 . The proposed TTA solution has been compared with, a more ASIC (application specific integrated circuits), like ASIP (application specific instruction processor) solution and a coprocessor accelerator-based solution. The proposed solution is more flexible: easily programmable due to high level language support, easily scalable, and still efficient in energy consumption needed to complete the CFO (carrier frequency offset) estimation task. Because of these attractive characteristics, TTA is also a potential candidate for SDR platforms.