ePUMA: A unique memory access based parallel DSP processor for SDR and CR

Abstract

This paper presents ePUMA, a master-slave heterogeneous DSP processor for communications and multimedia. We introduce the ePUMA VPE, a vector processing slave-core designed for heavy DSP workloads and demonstrate how its features can used to implement DSP kernels that efficiently overlap computing, data access and control to achieve maximum datapath utilization. The efficiency is evaluated by implementing a basic set of kernels commonly used in SDR. The experiments show that all kernels asymptotically reach above 90% effective datapath utilization. while many approach 100%, thus the design effectively overlaps computing, data access and control. Compared to popular VLIW solutions, the need for a large register file with many ports is eliminated, thus saving power and chip area. When compared to a commercial VLIW solution, our solution also achieves code size reductions of up to 30 times and a significantly simplified kernel implementation.