Multi-core DSP Applications in the SoC Era

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Multi-core DSP Applications in the SoC Era [Copy link]

One of the most important application areas of multi-core DSP is 3G digital mobile communication. This includes applications in both base stations and mobile terminals. The DSP used in base stations focuses more on high performance and is not very sensitive to cost and power consumption. Mobile terminals are oriented to specific users, and their design must take into account functions, power consumption, volume, price, etc. Therefore, mobile terminals have more stringent requirements on core processors. The core processors of 2G digital cellular phones are all based on a dual-processor structure, that is, they include 1 DSP and 1 RISC microcontroller (MCU). DSP is used to implement the functions of the physical layer protocol in the communication protocol stack; while MCU is used to support the user interface and implement the various functions of the upper-layer communication protocol. 3G digital mobile communication standards increase communication bandwidth and place greater emphasis on advanced data applications, such as videophone, GPS positioning, MPEG4 playback, etc. This places higher demands on the performance of the core processor, that is, the ability to support 3G mobile communication and data applications at the same time. In modern 3G systems, the processing speed requirement is probably more than 6 to 13 billion operations per second. If the existing DSP is used, 20 to 80 low-power DSP chips are needed to meet the requirements. Therefore, the multi-core DSP processor chip that undertakes this task must significantly improve performance without increasing power consumption, and must have powerful multi-task real-time processing capabilities. Under the real-time scheduling of the embedded operating system, the multi-core DSP can divide multiple tasks into each core, greatly improving the computing speed and real-time processing performance. These features will enable 3G mobile phones to simultaneously support real-time communication and user interactive multimedia applications, and support users to download various applications. Figure 1 shows the architecture of a 3G communication multi-core DSP processor.