Designing BEE: a Hardware Emulation Engine for Signal Processing in Low-Power Wireless Applications

Kimmo Kuusilinna, Chen Chang, M. Josie Ammer, Brian Richards, Robert W. Brodersen

This paper describes the design of a large-scale emulation engine and an application example from the field of low-power wireless devices. The primary goal of the emulator is to support design space exploration of real-time algorithms. The emulator is customized for dataflow dominant architectures especially focusing on telecommunication related applications. Due to its novel routing architecture and application specific nature, the emulator is capable of real-time execution of a class of algorithms in its application space. Moreover, the dataflow structure facilitates the development of a highly abstracted design flow for the emulator. Simulations and practical measurements on commercial development boards are used to verify that real-time emulation of a low-power TDMA receiver is feasible at a clock speed of 25 MHz.