SoC for Advanced Multimedia Broadband Access

In order to measure up to the development of shorter time-to-market cycles on the one hand and technical requirements of more complex SoC designs on the other, a new architectural approach is needed. This new approach not only enables design-reuse and early error detection but also offers a surface- and cost optimized solution. It is therefore imperative to conduct projects in a time span of as short as six months from initial specification to the final and correct implementation; regardless of the complexity of design problems. Approaches such as Multi DSP architectures or FPGA solutions do offer the required flexibility, but they are not optimal when it comes to performance and costs per piece. For this reason they are hardly ever applied in the mass market of consumer electronics.

SAMBA is designed to meet up to the market requirements for a cost-optimized programmable multi-standard solution. Because of constantly rising initial production costs there is also a demand for growing sales figures for a Return on Investment.

SAMBA combines the different technical requirements, which will allow scalability of the processing power, programmability and an optimal weighting of hardware- and software-based designs in order to find an optimal balance between fixed-wired and freely-programmable modules. The SAMBA core works on a high-grade parallel and scalable VLIW processor architecture that was developed by ON DEMAND Microelectronics and which should be optimized for special processing operations. It has to be guaranteed that internally- developed hardware modules as well as IPs made by other manufacturers can be seamlessly integrated into the platform and the simulation environment.

With the platform SAMBA a generally valid method should be established within this project so that such hardware/software requirements can be simulated. The suitability of this method is indicated by a multimode receiver for the highly contrarily-working standards DVB-T and ATSC. With SAMBA fixed-wired single-standard solutions as well as flexible software-programmable multi-standard solutions for low-cost and high-end SoC should be conceptualized and developed.

Project SAMBA is a cooperation between

• ON DEMAND Microelectronics GmbH as industrial partner
• the Institut of Computer Engineering at Vienna University of Technology
• the School of Electronics of Carinthia University of Applied Sciences

The project was started in October 2005 with a duration of 2 years. Carinthia University of Applied Sciences contributed to this project with a study on the multi-mode demodulator frontend. The project was funded by FIT-IT and the industrial partner.

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