On Implementing Digital Signal Processing Tasks of Communications Systems in VLSI

Abstract The design space for the implementation of digital signal processing tasks of communications systems in VLSI (very large scale integration) is very large, which makes the implementation a challenging task. The design space is explored, and implementation problems are pointed out. A key feature of today′s communications systems is that the algorithms are fixed, allowing the implementation to be application specifically tailored to the algorithm it supports. Methods and examples are presented which show that a three-level design approach is well suited in overcoming the gap between algorithm and architecture design, to achieve efficient solutions. The three levels are the algorithm-, word-, and bit-level.