Customized Processor Design for 5G Data Link Layer Processing

Sammanfattning: This thesis aims to explore the workflow related to designing an application specific instruction-set processor (ASIP). An ASIP is a processor similar to a hardware accelerator (HAC) in terms of performance and efficiency, but containing elements of general purpose processors (GPPs) when it comes to programmability and flexibility. The thesis centers around the design of an ASIP which will handle layer-2 processing in the 5G uplink i.e. keeping track of resources that are used by the user-equipment (UE) device. The ASIP and its related workflow are a relatively new concept in the wireless communications field; historically the large phone manufacturers have bought or licensed intellectual property (IP) from large chip designers such as ARM or Qualcomm, and then designed their applications around the framework that these chipsets provide. The main driving factor behind this exploration of the ASIP as a competitor to the GPP and the HAC is the relative maturity of design tools and the need for ever smaller devices, where efficiency in both power and size while keeping performance high is of utmost importance. Along with greater efficiency, today’s devices are also often required to have some sort of design flexibility to facilitate changing standards or device usage cases. The design tool chosen for use in this thesis is Codasip Studio, which has a workflow similar to other chipset design tools: a description of the architecture and it’s instruction set architecture (ISA) is constructed, then after testing this behavioural representation it is sequentialized into the pipeline model and simulated. The final step is testing the firmware and peripherals on the simulated processor, before a VHDL or Verilog design is generated by the tool ready to export for register-transfer level (RTL) synthesis. The ASIP in this thesis is designed to run seven tasks which it switches between depending on what type of data processing is required or available at the moment. The design finalized in the thesis contains three tasks that are completely implemented and one task that is partially completed but not synthesized in RTL. The assumption that the remaining tasks have a similar complexity means that the results can be extrapolated to give an approximation of the entire processor. The total number of implemented instructions is 88. Of these 88 instructions, 55 are ASIs and 33 are part of the base instruction set, the set needed for the processor to be Turing complete, and therefore able to act as a GPP. The synthesized ASIP design is compared to several ARM equivalents in power consumption, area usage and instruction efficiency; the amount of instructions that are needed to complete the test firmware loop. The results prove that the ASIP is a superior choice to the other processors, in this specific use case, by providing much higher throughput at roughly the same power consumption and area usage. In regards to the HAC comparison, no data was available to compare with in this specific case, so the comparison in this thesis is mostly a subjective one in regard to the design process.