Designing BEE: A Hardware Emulation Engine for Signal Processing in Low-Power Wireless Applications

This paper describes the design of a large-scale emulation engine and an application example from the field of low-power wireless devices. The primary goal of the emulator is to support design space exploration of real-time algorithms. The emulator is customized for dataflow dominant architectures, especially focusing on telecommunication-related applications. Due to its novel routing architecture and application-specific nature, the emulator is capable of real-time execution of a class of algorithms in its application space. Moreover, the dataflow structure facilitates the development of a highly abstracted design flow for the emulator. Simulations and practical measurements on commercial development boards are used to verify that real-time emulation of a low-power TDMA receiver is feasible at a clock speed of 25 MHz.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu 1, P.O. Box. 553, Tampere, FIN-33101, Finland

   Kimmo Kuusilinna

2. Berkeley, Berkeley Wireless Research Center, University of California, 2108 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, 94704, USA

   Kimmo Kuusilinna, Chen Chang, M. Josephine Ammer, Brian C. Richards & Robert W. Brodersen

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kimmo Kuusilinna.

Reprints and permissions