ConnX Baseband Engine

Products » Comms DSP » ConnX Baseband Engine

High Performance DSP for Wireless Baseband Communications

The ConnX BBE16 Baseband Engine is a high performance DSP designed for use in next-generation communication baseband processors such as those found in LTE and 4G cellular radios and multi-standard broadcast receivers. The high computation requirements in such applications require new and innovative architectures with a high degree of parallelism and efficient I/O. The ConnX BBE16 meets these needs by combining a 8-way SIMD, 3-issue VLIW processing pipeline with a rich and extensible set of interfaces.

The ConnX BBE16 is built around a core vector pipeline made of 16 18bx18b MACs.  These multipliers and associated adder and multiplexer trees enable operations such as FFT butterflies, parallel complex multiple operations and signal filter structures.   The results of these operations can be full precision or truncated/rounded/saturated and shifted to meet the needs of different algorithms and implementations.

The instruction set has been optimized for performance of DSP kernel operations such as FFT and FIR as well as matrix multiplies. Acceleration has been added for a wide range of key wireless functions giving very high performance in wireless applications.

The ConnX BBE16 supports programming in C supported by a vectorizing compiler.  Automatic vectorization of scalar C and full support for vector datatypes allows the development of algorithms without the need to program at the assembly level. Native C operator overloading is supported for natural programming with standard C operators on real and complex vector data types.

BBE16 Block Diagram

A Simplified Block Structure of the ConnX BBE16

Optimizing Compiler with Support for SIMD Vectorization

For the ConnX Baseband Engine DSP, Tensilica offers efficient compiler support including automatic code scheduling, software pipelining, and SIMD vectorization of ANSI C code. In addition, the ConnX Baseband Engine compilers include direct access to all of the advanced architecture features via embedded functions. Together, these compiler features enable assembly code performance and code density without the time and risk of assembly code programming.

Program In C, Not Assembly

Because of the ConnX Baseband Engine's Optimizing Compiler, designers can use standard C code - not assembly - to speed the design effort. The compiler automatically vectorizes ANSI C code:

Vectorization

Toolkits Speed the Design Process

In addition to the optimizing compiler, Tensilica offers two Eclipse-based toolkits to speed the design process. The Xtensa Processor Developers Toolkit is a set of powerful yet easy-to-use tools for processor customization. Designers can pick from several processor options (memories, interfaces, etc.), run the pipeline-modeled, cycle-accurate instruction set simulator or the high-speed instruction-accurate simulator, and perform system modeling with these proven tools.

The Xtensa Software Developers Toolkit provides a comprehensive collection of code generation and analysis tools that speeds the development process. The Xtensa software development environment is generated - automatically - from the same database as the processor hardware description so designers are guaranteed a perfect match. All configuration options are supported, so there is no need to manually edit or extend the tools. This approach ensures correctness and consistency by construction. Designers get a compiler, linker, assembler, and debugger tuned exactly - and matched exactly - to their tailored processor hardware. The software development environment includes powerful source-level multi-core debugging with flexible data-type display and profiling of both performance and energy to support rapid development of optimal system solutions.

Scalable Architecture for Maximum Performance

While many designs will only require one ConnX Baseband Engine, this architecture can be scaled easily with up to eight instances, providing over 250 GOPS (Giga Operations Per Second) performance. See this section for more information on how one to eight ConnX Baseband Processors can be designed into a system.

Marketing Agency