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Design and Implementation of a Power-aware FFT Core for OFDM-based DSA-enabled Cognitive Radios

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Abstract

This research work presents the design and the physical implementation of a power aware FFT core for OFDM-based, dynamic spectrum access (DSA) enabled cognitive radios. The FFT core is equipped with a pruning engine that allows the run-time removal of dummy operations (e.g. multiplications by a zero term) related to the pruning of sub-carriers of the communication systems. The pruning algorithm introduced by this research work utilizes a reduced size configuration matrix, which limits the memory requirements’ overhead. Finally, the physical implementation of the FFT on a 45 nm technology node showed that, for a 8 % area overhead, the total power saving settles around 10 % when in the presence of a medium to high pruning level, justifying the silicon area overhead introduced by the pruning unit.

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Correspondence to Roberto Airoldi.

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This work was funded by the Academy of Finland under contract #258506 (DEFT: Design of a Highly-parallel Heterogeneous MP-SoC Architecture for Future Wireless Technologies).

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Airoldi, R., Campi, F., Cucchi, M. et al. Design and Implementation of a Power-aware FFT Core for OFDM-based DSA-enabled Cognitive Radios. J Sign Process Syst 78, 257–265 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-014-0894-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-014-0894-z

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