Fast End-to-End Simulation and Exploration of Many-RISCV-Core Baseband Transceivers for Software-Defined Radio-Access Networks
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The fast-rising demand for wireless bandwidth [1] requires rapid evolution of high-performance baseband processing infrastructure. Programmable many-core processors for software-defined radio (SDR) have emerged as high-performance baseband processing engines, offering the flexibility required to capture evolving wireless standards and technologies [2]–[4]. This trend must be supported by a design framework enabling functional validation and end-to-end performance analysis of SDR hardware within realistic radio environment models. We propose a static binary translation based simulator augmented with a fast, approximate timing model of the hardware and coupled to wireless channel models to simulate the most performance critical physical layer functions implemented in software on a many (1024) RISC-V cores cluster customized for SDR. Our framework simulates the detection of a 5G OFDM-symbol on a server-class processor in 9.5s-3min, on a single thread, depending on the input MIMO size (three orders of magnitude faster than RTL simulation). The simulation is easily parallelized to 128 threads with 73-121× speedup compared to a single thread.
Language: English
Subfield: Hardware and Architecture
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: European Commission
OpenAlex ID: W7082662694
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