Design and evaluation of architectures for efficient generation of control sequences

Sammanfattning: Ultra millimeter-wave (mmWave) radars have become a vital sensor in automotive, surveillance, and consumer electronics thanks to its precise measurements and low power consumption. However, they required a precise control to coordinate their different modules and produce meaningful data. In this thesis work, we introduce an approach to perform the control and coordination of the radar based in microcode that is served as instructions its different modules. The control system is implemented with five different architectures following two strategies. The first one consist in storing the microcode in memory from where they are latter read with direct memory access. On the other hand, second approach consists in customizing the processor to generate and push the instructions directly to the rest of the radar. The Pulpissimo system on chip is used as development platform with the Ibex RISC-V core configuration. The architectures are evaluated in terms of throughput of microcode words per clock cycle, energy consumption and area after synthesis. The results show that architectures which implement more parallelism achieve more robust throughput in exchange of a bigger area and higher energy consumption. Additionally, customizing the processor show a better throughput than architectures which use independent modules.