Architectures and Circuits for Software-Defined Radios: Scaling and Scalability for Low Cost and Low Energy

Energy scalable architectures and circuits for SDRs are proposed, for both a reconfigurable RF front-end and a heterogeneous multiprocessor SoC in a baseband platform. A performance/energy manager dynamically exploits the energy scalability and the dynamics in application requirements and propagation environment, realizing low-power operation. For the transmitter, the energy-scalability is translated to an average system-level energy-efficiency improvement of up to 40%.