Software Defined Radio: Baseband Technologies for 3G Handsets and Basestations

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The Sandbridge Sandblaster Communications Processor

John Glossner, Erdem Hokenek and Mayan Moudgill

Sandbridge Technologies, Inc., Whiteplains, NY

As applications converge to multimedia systems, user terminals will increasingly be required to support voice, data, and video applications. Further, convergent devices will increasingly roam seamlessly across multiple communications systems. Traditionally, wireless communications systems have been single mode and implemented in hardware. To avoid excessive hardware costs, a software defined radio (SDR) approach offers a programmable and dynamically reconfigurable method of reusing hardware to implement the physical layer processing. From a processor architecture perspective, support for signal processing, control code, and Java execution on a common SDR platform – a convergence architecture – offers a route to both power and cost reduction for such devices.

In this chapter we describe such an architecture applicable to reconfigurable baseband processing. The architecture supports all datatypes appropriate to convergence devices, efficiently executing Java, digital signal processing (DSP), and control code. It is programmed in C or Java, is executed on a multithreaded processor in real time and is capable of executing physical layer processing of multiple waveforms completely in software. Architectural features that reduce power dissipation and enable real-time processing are described, along with the software development tools, both ...