An energy-efficient SIMD DSP with multiple VLIW configurations and an advanced memory access unit for LTE-A modem LSIs

Energy efficiency is the most important factor in the design of wireless modem LSIs for mobile handset systems. We have developed an energy-efficient SIMD DSP for LTE-A modem LSIs. Our DSP has mainly two hardware features in order to reduce energy consumption. The first one is multiple VLIW configurations to minimize accesses to instruction memories. The second one is an advanced memory access unit to realize complex memory accesses required for wireless baseband processing. With these features, performance of our DSP is about 1.7 times faster than a base DSP on average for standard LTE-A Libraries. Our DSP achieves about 20% improvement in energy efficiency compared to a base DSP for LTE-A modem LSIs.