Verification and FPGA implementation of a floating point SIMD processor for MIMO processing

Sammanfattning: The rapidly increasing capabilities of digital electronics have increased the demand of Software Defined Radio (SDR), which were not possible in the special purpose hardware. These enhanced capabilities come at the cost of time due to complex operations involved in multi-antenna wireless communications, one of those operations is complex matrix inversion. This thesis presents the verification and FPGA implementation of a SIMD processor, which was developed at Computer Engineering division of Linköping university, Sweden. This SIMD processor was designed specifically for performing complex matrix inversion in an efficient way, but it can also be reused for other operations. The processor is fully verified using all the possible combinations of instructions. An optimized firmware for this processor is implemented for efficiently inverting 4×4 matrices. Due to large number of subtractions involved in direct analytical approach, it losses stability for 4×4 matrices. Instead of this, a blockwise subdivision is used, in which 4×4 matrix is subdivided into four 2×2 matrices. Based on these 2×2 matrices, the inverse of 4×4 matrix is computed using the direct analytical approach and some other computations. Finally, the SIMD processor is integrated with Senior processor (a controlprocessor) and synthesized on Xilinx, Virtex-4 FPGA. After this, the performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated. A firmware is implemented for the Senior which uploads and downloads data/program into the SIMD unit using both I/O and DMA.