Vector Processing as an Enabler for Software-Defined Radio in Handheld Devices

A major challenge of software-defined radio (SDR) is to realize many giga operations per second of flexible baseband processing within a power budget of only a few hundred mW. A heterogeneous hardware architecture with the programmable vector processor EVP as key component can support WLAN, UMTS, and other standards. A detailed rationale for the EVP architecture, based on the analysis of a number of key algorithms, as well as implementation and benchmarking results are described.