Overview

Today s mobile communication business is impacted by high data rates, mobility demands and flexibility requirements. High data rates are implicating high processing power, whereas mobility demands have to be covered by ultra-low power dissipation, and fast evolving standards demand for flexibility. The solution to this problem looks like dedicated hardware implementations, but those are lacking in flexibility. Adapting a system to a successor standard or supporting different systems on the same hardware platform is merely impossible.

If only high data rates and flexibility aspects were taken into account, the problem could be tackled traditionally by deeply pipelined high performance processor architectures, providing several GHz of processing power. Executing software on the processor architecture gives the flexibility to develop platforms which support different standards where even some of them can evolve without demanding for a new platform. The benefits of deeply pipelined processors are soon outweighed by control and data dependencies in the application code itself and the high clock rates are conflicting with ultra-low power requirements anyway.

The traditional solution approaches do not seem to fit. The exit strategy out of the dilemma of providing high data rate support at low power dissipation with enough flexibility is efficient use of resources. Identifying those parts of the application where flexibility provides an advantage over dedicated hardware implementations requires to handle complex trade-offs between hardware and software partitioning.

This chapter introduces an application-specific adaptable core architecture for SoC platform solutions. The architecture provides sufficient...