Algorithm-Architecture Co-Design for Digital Front-Ends in Mobile Receivers

Abstract: Popular Abstract in English From the pure technological perspective (leaving the business aside), the design of electronic devices, such as mobile phones, is an extremely complex process often involving a large number of disciplines, from mastering complicated mathematical models to proficiency of physical and electrical properties of specific materials involved in the manufacturing. In order to overcome this challenge, abstraction layers are used to separate the various disciplines, so that, a well trained individual can design this complex device from a system perspective. However, as one can expect, when the already complicated disciplines evolve the abstraction layers become more and more complex, thus, it becomes increasingly difficult for a single individual to make the right choices, resulting in sub-optimal implementations. In the thesis, the author tries to defeat this challenge by removing the boundary between algorithm and hardware architecture. An algorithm, in this case, describes a mathematical model characterizing the procedure for all the mathematical operations that the mobile phone (or parts of it) need to perform in order to arrive to the desired functionality. The hardware architecture describes the phone's physical system, its components and the relation between those components. In this thesis, the cross-disciplinary optimization is done in three manners: In the first, the optimization is done from architecture side toward the algorithm side. Here, the effects of extreme quantization, an effect typically seen as a hardware-only issue, is modeled in the algorithm development so that with just the right algorithm tinkering, parts of the mobile phone can save up to 80% in energy consumption. In the second manner, the optimization is done in the opposite direction, from the algorithm side towards the hardware side. Here, the algorithm is set fixed, and a number of hardware architectures are selected for filtering. The correct selection leads to one of the hardware modules to become redundant. Then, by removing this redundant module, the system utilization is increased and the entire architecture becomes more flexible.