Application of a Heterogeneous Reconfigurable Architecture to OFDM Wireless Systems

OFDM communication systems are widely used in today's wired and wireless system such as ADSL, IEEE 802.11a/g, and DVB-T/H. Current OFDM systems are built on custom ASIC which suffers from a tedious and costly design cycle. In this work we first present an overview of HERS, a heterogeneous reconfigurable system. HERS is a flexible and programmable software defined radio platform and is comprised of a set of heterogeneous reconfigurable engines connected using a high speed bus. Each reconfigurable engine is a specialized reconfigurable processor designed for a class of algorithms and is highly optimized for power and performance. Next, we report on implementation of the most computationally intensive constituent algorithms of IEEE 802.11a/g and DVB-T/H standards.