AUTOMATED PERFORMANCE-BASED DESIGN TECHNIQUE FOR AN EFFICIENT LTE PDSCH IMPLEMENTATION USING SDSOC TOOL

Abstract

Systems on Chip (SoC) creates massive design challenges for the SoC-based designers. The design challenges start from functional complexity, architectural design, verification tests and finally meeting performance constraints. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of components and tools introduce long and large design cycles. In addition, the hardware-software co-design includes complicated design process. The design complexity includes the following: first, co-specification, where the roles of software and hardware in implementing system functionality are specified and the implementation is assigned to either software or hardware. Second, co-development, where the software, hardware, and interfaces are developed. Third, co-verification where the optimization and refining of the SW/HW components are performed to meet the design constraints. The Software Defined System on Chip (SDSoC) tool is developed by Xilinx to create custom SoC on a heterogeneous FPGA-CPU platform. The SDSoC tool offers a fast and short design cycle for heterogeneous FPGA-CPU platform development. The SDSoC tool also integrates multiple tools to make the co-design of the hardware-software more flexible. In this thesis, the typical SDSoC design flow is presented. In addition, the thesis provides a new automated SDSoc design technique to design SoC on a heterogeneous FPGA-CPU platform based on performance metrics such as area, power ...etc. The new design technique used to explore the performance metrics for all possible combination between software implementation and hardware-accelerated implementation for "n” functions. Moreover, the new design technique used to determine platforms that achieve performance metrics and to select the platform that achieves the best overall performance. As a case study, design of Physical Downlink Shared CHannel (PDSCH) in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is employed. The architecture of transmitter and receiver of the LTE PDSCH are studied and the LTE PDSCH transmitter/receiver software functions arewritten using C programming language. The objective of this thesis is to implement the LTE PDSCH transmitter functions and the LTE PDSCH receiverfunctionsusing SDSoC tool, to select the platform that meets performance metrics constraints, and to select the platform that achieves the best overall performance.