BENCHMARK OF TRIGGERED INSTRUCTION BASED COARSE GRAINED RECONFIGURABLE ARCHITECTURE FOR RADIO BASE STATION

Sammanfattning: Spatially-programmed architectures such as FPGA are among the most prevailing hardware in various application areas. However FPGA suffers from great overheads such as area, latency and power efficiency. Coarse-grained Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA) is designed in order to compensate these disadvantages of FPGA. In this thesis, a Triggered Instruction based novel CGRA designed by Intel is evaluated. Benchmark work in this thesis focuses on signal processing area. Three performance limiting functions, Channel Estimation, Radix-2 FFT and Interleaving are selected from LTE Uplink Receiver PHY Benchmark which is an open source benchmark, and implemented and analyzed in Triggered Instruction Architecture (TIA). Throughput-area relationships and throughput/area-area relationships are summarized in curves using a resource estimation method. The benchmark result shows that TIA offers good flexibility for temporal and spatial execution, and a mix of them. Designs in TIA are scalable and adjustable according to different performance requirement. Moreover, based on the development work, this thesis discusses development flow of TIA, various programming techniques, low latency mapping solutions, code size comparison, development environment and integration of heterogeneous system with TIA.