The ConnX Baseband Engine and its application in LTE

Existing DSP architectures cannot meet these demands, and vendors are scrambling to develop new, more efficient and powerful architectures. This paper describes a new digital signal architecture, Tensilica's ConnX Baseband Engine, that is tuned for the demands of highly programmable baseband processing at 100-Mbit/s data rates.

Some quick background: The ConnX Baseband Engine architecture was announced on June 22, 2009 and is a configuration option package for Tensilca's Xtensa LX customizable processor core. It includes an optimized instruction set and memory system targeting high throughput and low power for emerging baseband PHY standards, especially those using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and multiple input multiple output (MIMO) transmission. Its calling card of (relatively) easy programmability, including automatic vectorization for ANSI C programs and optimized instructions for fast complex FFT, FIR and matrix operations, make the new architecture particularly suitable for cost-oriented base-stations, femtocells, digital media broadcast receivers and software-defined-radio handsets.

This feature provides an overview of the Engine's 3-way, VLIW, 8-way SIMD architecture and its processing and data-rate capabilities and potential. It then proceeds to provide a sample usage case with LTE MIMO decoding, how the system would be architected using the ConnX Baseband Engine, how to program the system employing the new baseband-specific instructions -- with sample code -- and what tools are available and how to take advantage of them.

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