A Low-Cost and Energy-Efficient Multiprocessor System-on-Chip for UWB MAC Layer

Hao XIAO  Tsuyoshi ISSHIKI  Arif Ullah KHAN  Dongju LI  Hiroaki KUNIEDA  Yuko NAKASE  Sadahiro KIMURA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E95-D   No.8   pp.2027-2038
Publication Date: 2012/08/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1587/transinf.E95.D.2027
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Computer System
Keyword: 
multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC),  ultra-wideband (UWB),  medium access control (MAC),  shared-memory,  

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Summary: 
Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has attracted much attention recently due to its high data rate and low emission power. Its media access control (MAC) protocol, WiMedia MAC, promises a lot of facilities for high-speed and high-quality wireless communication. However, these benefits in turn involve a large amount of computational load, which challenges the traditional uniprocessor architecture based implementation method to provide the required performance. However, the constrained cost and power budget, on the other hand, makes using commercial multiprocessor solutions unrealistic. In this paper, a low-cost and energy-efficient multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC), which tackles at once the aspects of system design, software migration and hardware architecture, is presented for the implementation of UWB MAC layer. Experimental results show that the proposed MPSoC, based on four simple RISC processors and shared-memory infrastructure, achieves up to 45% performance improvement and 65% power saving, but takes 15% less area than the uniprocessor implementation.