Efficient Implementations of WiMAX OFDM Functions on Reconfigurable Platforms
By Ahmed Sagir, August 2008
Abstract:
This thesis investigates three approaches to implement the OFDM functions of the fixed-WiMAX standard on
reconfigurable platforms. The custom RTL approach showed the ability of a medium size FPGA to accommodate the
design with only 50% occupation rate. The AccelDSP approach showed an area overhead of 10%. However, the
throughput obtained was almost 1/4 of that obtained in the custom RTL approach. The Tensilica Xtensa
processor approach presented remarkable figures, in terms of power, area and design time. Comparing the three
approaches indicated that the custom RTL approach has the lead in terms of performance. However, both the
AccelDSP and the Tensilica approaches accelerated the design time by a factor of two and provided early
architectural exploration capabilities. The obtained power results showed that the Tensilica approach required
approximately a total power consumption of about 12-15 times less than those results obtained by the other two approaches.
