Hardware-Software Codesign of Wireless Transceivers on Zynq Heterogeneous Systems

作     者：Drozdenko, Benjamin Zimmermann, Matthew Dao, Tuan Chowdhury, Kaushik Leeser, Miriam 

作者机构：Northeastern Univ Dept Elect & Comp Engn Boston MA 02115 USA 

出 版 物：《IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EMERGING TOPICS IN COMPUTING》 (IEEE Trans. Emerg. Top. Comput.)

年 卷 期：2018年第6卷第4期

页      面：566-578页

核心收录：

学科分类：0810[工学-信息与通信工程] 0808[工学-电气工程] 08[工学] 0812[工学-计算机科学与技术（可授工学、理学学位）] 

基　　金：MathWorks  Inc 

主　　题：Heterogeneous (hybrid) systems reconfigurable hardware data communications devices receivers transmitters signal processing systems wireless communication wireless systems hardware/software interfaces hardware/software codesign 

摘      要：Recently, wireless technology has seen many new devices, protocols, and applications. As standards adapt to keep pace with hardware availability and user needs, the trend points towards systems that achieve high data rates with low energy consumption. Moreover, there is an emerging vision of a transceiver architecture that can adapt to multiple protocols, existing and evolving. This architecture maps computation to underlying heterogeneous computing elements, composed of processors and field programmable gate array (FPGA) fabric. Here, we introduce a method for modeling a generic orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) wireless transceiver on the Zynq system-on-chip by decomposing the standard specifications into a set of functional blocks used in multiple protocols. Implementing the 802.11a physical (PHY) layer as an example, our approach creates Simulink model variants for both transmitter and receiver, each with a different boundary between hardware and software components. We use these models to generate hardware description language (HDL) code and bitstream for the programmable logic and C code with an executable for the advanced RISC machine (ARM) processor. We validate, profile, and analyze the models using metrics including frame time, resource utilization, and energy consumption. Our results demonstrate how to select a co-design configuration considering execution time and energy, and show how our platform can be reused for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and protocol coexistence.