Ninesilica: A Homogeneous MPSoC Approach for SDR Platforms

This chapter presents the study of Software Defined Radio applications on homogeneous multi-core architectures based on the Silicon Cafe template. Two instances of the template have been realized and implemented on an Altera Stratix IV FPGA device. Ninesilica, the first instance of the template, is a homogeneous 3 × 3 mesh of processing elements realizing a standalone cluster. The second instance of the template is a clustered architecture composed of four Ninesilica clusters. Significant kernels of WCDMA and OFDM kernels were ported on the architectures analyzing the platform performance in terms of computational power, algorithm scalability, energy consumption and efficiency, portability of the mapping and hardware scalability. The achieved results showed that the proposed approach offers a high flexibility and parallelization efficiency, making homogeneous solutions a good candidate for the implementation of SDR systems.