Solid State Circuits Society

March 18, 2010

SSCS Chapter Anniversary Meeting

Speaker: Dr. Chris Rowen, CTO of Tensilica

Title: Ultra-Low-Power Software-Defined Radio for LTE Wireless Baseband: an embedded systems grand challenge

Abstract:

Next generation cellular systems offer an great leap in bandwidth (>100Mbps) but face daunting problems in design complexity, cost and energy efficiency. The 3GPP LTE standard combines several major innovations in communications protocols, including OFDM, MIMO and Turbo decoding to reach high spectral efficiency that stretch the limits of baseband design complexity. At the same time LTE is also seeing rapid uptake, with wide proliferation of cost-reduced basestations and long-battery-life terminals expected within 2-3 years.

This creates a paradox.

Traditionally, designers have turned to programmable systems using DSPs for this class of bleeding-edge algorithms, but these cannot meet the cost and power goals. On the other hand, hardwired datapath design may be sufficiently energy-efficient, but is paintakingly slow and error prone, especially in the face of a new, evolving standard. This talk explores the challenges of Cat4 and Cat5 LTE baseband implementation and explores the range of design styles, processors, building blocks, virtual prototyping and system-on-chip silicon implementation methods for real world LTE chips. It explores a pragamtic design style based on a new generation of automatically generated DSP engines and building blocks that can handle the development complexity and computational load inside a very tight energy envelope.

Speaker Bio:

Chris Rowen, Ph.D.
Founder, Chief Technology Officer, member of the board of directors, and Tensilica’s first president. He was a pioneer in the development of RISC architecture at Stanford in the early 80s and helped start MIPS Computer Systems Inc. in 1984, where he served as Vice President for Microprocessor Development. Most recently, he was Vice President and General Manager of the Design Reuse Group of Synopsys Incorporated. He received a B.A. in physics from Harvard University and M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

SCV SSCS Technical meetings are typically held on The THIRD Thursday of each month at:

National Semiconductor Building E Auditorium
2900 Semiconductor Dr., Santa Clara, CA 95051 Directions and NSC Map

Refreshments are provided at 6:00 PM and the talk typically begins at 6:30 PM.
Donations requested to partially cover food cost.

The talks are open to everyone, feel free to join us even if you are not an IEEE member yet.

Welcome

Calendar

Next Meeting

Search Previous Events