Energy-efficient Reconfigurable FEC Processor for Multi-standard Wireless Communication Systems

In this paper, we describe HW/SW cooptimizations for reconfigurable application specific instruction-set processors (ASIPs). Based on our previous very long instruction word (VLIW) ASIP, the proposed framework realizes various forward error-correction (FEC) algorithms for wireless communication systems. In order to enhance the energy efficiency, we newly introduce several design methodologies including high-radix algorithms, tasklevel out-of-order executions, and intensive resource allocations with loop-level rescheduling. The case study on the radix-4 turbo decoding shows that the proposed techniques improve the energy efficiency by 3.7 times compared to the previous architecture.