Several application-specific processor design approaches have been proposed and investigated to cope with the emerging flexibility requirements jointly associated with the maximum performance efficiency and minimum implementation area and power consumption. Dynamic scheduling of a set of instructions generally leads to an overhead related to instruction decoding. To mitigate this overhead, other approaches have been proposed using static scheduling of datapath control signals. In this context, No-Instruction-Set-Computer (NISC) concept have been introduced considering that a dedicated processor to a specific application does not need an instruction set especially when it is programmed by its designers and not by its users. In this paper, the hardware architecture design of flexible NISC-based architecture design dedicated for minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) linear detection is presented. The devised design, which is used in iterative turbo-receiver, fulfills the performance requirements of emergent wireless communication standards with throughput reaching that of LTE-Advanced. FPGA hardware implementation of the detector architecture achieves a maximum throughput of 115.8 Mega symbols per second for [Formula: see text] and 6.4 Mega symbols per second for [Formula: see text] MIMO systems for an operating clock frequency of 202.67[Formula: see text]MHz.
Switching activity minimization by efficient instruction set architecture design
